for ever, the very time that the last Moor was
driven from Spain. Don John (with Cervantes,
first of the boarders) to drive back those threatening
and terrible Turks that had hung so
long like a thunder-cloud ready to burst over
Europe, endangering not merely this or that
empire (which, whether it were red or blue
on the map mattered not much) but, what
was more terrible, even the very life of
Christianity itself. Call you this no work
done by the short-lived labourer in the great
field of nations? Have we not to thank
Spain for scotching the snake of
Mohammedanism; for discovering the New World,
for writing Don Quixote; for giving us, in
long wars against the Moor and Frenchman,
a grand standard of heroic chivalry, armed
religion, and lion-like endurance of fire and
steel ? And if we do think rather harshly
of the Inquisition and of South American
cruelties, let us review these doings with
kind pity, remembering the stubborn and
unforgiving bigotry that ages of struggles
with armed Mohammedanism had produced,
hundreds of years after our paganism lay
forgotten in its grave under Stonehenge;
let us learn from it to be ourselves tolerant
in small surplice matters, and to treat with
forbearance the Red Indian, the Caffre, and
the Australian aborigine. Why Spain
maintained her power so short a time none can
tell, except he who gave that power and who
took it away. Let it check the national
pride of the student of history to reflect,
that perhaps Spain's time may come again
when ours is over. It is as a rich mine that
greedy Fortune has worked hastily for the
surface gold, passing on to richer fields; she
may again return, and drive down the shafts
to new lodes and wider and more lasting
veins.

The neglect of Spain is peculiarly
disgraceful to Englishmen, because the fortunes
of Spain and England have so often been
interwoven, and their manners and customs
(peculiarly in Shakespeare's time) have very much
influenced and coloured our own. Except at
Trafalgar, when they dearly paid for it, and
during the peddling War of Succession, Spain
has generally been our ally— cold, jealous
and distrustful— but still liking us, because
we feared and hated what they feared
and therefore hated— the French. Our
Crusaders (I am not going to be heavy)
helped them to pound the Moors even before
Chaucer's time, down to the taking of
Grenada, when a Scotch knight (ready for
the post of danger if he could not get any
other post) was the first to ascend the
Giralda. Then our Black Prince, aided that
blackguard (the word is rather below the
dignity of the historic style, but then it is
antithetical) Pedro the Cruel, who was
eventually killed by his own brother, whose
throat he had strived so hard to slit. Then
the Duke of Lancaster gave his fair daughter
Constance to the Prince of the Asturias, son
of Juan the First (not Don Juan of the operas).
Then we go down step by step of alliance,
and interchange of presents, till we come to
the great ante-Mormon King Henry the
Eighth; who, after a short trial of single-
blessedness, had his double and treble and
quadruple blessedness; who married the
unhappy daughter of the great Ferdinand
and Isabella, Columbus's friends. And, lastly,
we come to the Duke, and that waiting game
of war beginning with shame and ending
with a certain sulphurous glory, in which
we fought, not because we cared much for
Spain, but because it gave us a pretext
for bleeding Napoleon the great enemy
of our trade and of our threatening naval
greatness.

And now we know Spain as a sluggard
garden of a country, where men dance a good
deal, stab a good deal, and do a good deal on
the guitar; and from which we get our sherry
(some of it), our nuts, oranges, melons, and
chestnuts. We turn up our noses when we
talk of it, and lament with insolent pity its
undeveloped resources, its bigoted religious
queen, its pride and its laziness and its
hopeless poverty.

O, if kings at the great day of account,
shall have to relate with down-cast eyes, the
history of their buried talents, what scourges
and what shame shall not be for those
crowned fools who have let that bright land
become a prey to the wild goat and to the
locust; that drove its vices to herd together
in convents, and its virtues to starve on the
barren sheep-walks; that let its chivalry
decay into knavery, and its religion into the
very dotage of old men's mumbling!

It might make the thoughtful man weep
to take now the map of Spain, and look at
its choked-up harbours, and forsaken sea;
its ruined cities; its sluggish people, eager
only for vice and folly, slow to work, and
swift to stab. To see its plains of Paradise
mouldering away into deserts, its pastures
cankering into barrenness, its mines unheeded,
its ports unused; the very limbs of this great
country festering from the trunk; the land
that could produce all the treasures of east and
west, the wheat of Europe, the rice of Asia,
the sugar-cane of South America, the palm-
tree of Africa, now lying the dust-heap of the
nations; the beggared, despised, neglected,
sightless country, ready, like a sick sheep,
to be torn in pieces by the first eagle
that pounces on it from the peak of the
Pyrenees.

But I am losing myself in the labyrinths
of historical metaphysics. What I want, if
I can once get my horses well in hand, is to
contrast the Spain of Cervantes' time with
the Gil Blas Spain, that is to say, the Spain
of Elizabeth's and Shakespeare's time, with
the Spain of Philip the Fourth. Now, after
all, history is not to be sought for amongst
historians. It is to be found— at least the
history of manners; which is the real