thoughts and far-fetched metaphors, which the nation had inherited from the Arabs, enabled, it is true, Lope de Vega and Góngora, to establish a school of metaphysical bombast. But that vicious style was nearly confined to poetry, and successfully opposed, for a time, with the weapons of ridicule; a proof that the mass of the people still preserved habits of mind averse to inflated exaggeration. Had the colossal dimensions of the Spanish monarchy under Charles V. been endued with a strength proportionate to their magnitude, the tone of feeling which we observe in the extraordinary characters of Spanish history at that period would have become fixed in the nation. Settled pride would have been the root of their evil, and love of what is great and honourable the spring of their good qualities. But their lofty spirits could not brook disappointment. The downfall and humiliation of their monarchy produced a kind of national delusion, which showed itself in the most outrageous bragging and misrepresentation after defeat, and the most barbarous ferocity when they mastered their enemies. It was in the reign of Philip IV., when Spain lay like the mangled corpse of a giant, her best limbs severed by revolt, and her best blood spent in the obstinate contests which ended in her ruin, that the spirit of hollow boasting seized her in full possession. To present the reader with specimens of that spirit from the contemporary writers would take us much farther from our subject than we think it right to wander. But that, in 1641, it had already become as truly national and popular as it is at this day, will be evident to those who can read the Spanish novel of Luis Velez de Guevara, El Diablo Cojuelo, which Le Sage enlarged and altered into his Diable Boiteux. The lively Frenchman omitted a passage extremely characteristic of Spanish boasting, which, in his model, is connected with the quarrel between a tragic and a comic poet.* We allude to a meeting of Don Cleophas and his guide with a Frenchman, an Englishman, an Italian, and a German, the representatives of the nations which had humbled the pride of Spain, and helped her subjects in Holland to shake off her iron yoke. It is neither possible nor desirable to give a literal translation of the passage; but we will render it as closely as idiom and delicacy will allow. "What news of the war, Signor Castilian?" inquired the Italian.— "All is war at present," answered Don Cleophas." Against whom?" interrupted the Frenchman.-" Against the whole world (replied our hero), that all the world may lie at the feet of the Spanish monarch.""Faith, (rejoined the Frenchman) before the Spanish monarch"...The * Le Diable Boiteux, c. xiv., compared with El Diablo Cojuelo, Tranco V. Devil did not allow the Gavache* to finish the sentence; but, checking Don Cleophas, As your travelling tutor (he said) it is my duty to stop these drunkards' mouths. My life upon it! I too am a Spaniard; and can teach them from history that the kings of Castile have the power to drive us Devils out of human bodies; which is a nobler kind of doctoring than that of touching for the evil. The foreigners, observing the silence of the Spaniards, began a malicious titter; but the Devil, holding himself up in his chair, dressed as he was in the Spanish costume, said: "Good gentlemen, my friend was going to answer you; but as I am the eldest, I must consider that as my own concern: be, therefore, good enough to listen. The king of Spain is like a thorough-bred hound, assailed by every base cur in a neighbourhood, as he walks alone down the street. The canine mob, mistaking his indifference for fear, grow bolder and bolder, till, at the turning of a corner, some one ventures to snap at his tail. The generous dog here turns suddenly upon his assailants, paws them down to right and left, and, in a moment, clears the street so effectually that all barking is 'hushed, his enemies biting the stones for very spite. The same happens to our monarch with his enemies, who are mere curs by the side of his Catholic Majesty. Let them beware of touching his tail, for he will serve them in such a way that they will be at a loss where to hide their heads."' Supremely ludicrous as this passage must appear to every one acquainted with the helpless state of Spain at the time it was published, the feeling which dictated it has been ever since not only alive, but universally prevalent among the Spaniards. Conscious of their own powers, endowed generally with vivid and powerful imaginations, and, from the highest to the lowest, familiar at all periods of life with fragments of their ancient history magnified by romance and tradition; no people on earth were ever more reluctant to acknowledge their national insignificance. In the absolute ignorance of the rest of the world, which prevailed among them till they saw their country in the hands of invaders, the very proofs of higher refinement and civilization, which used to find their way to the interior of Spain, in the products of foreign industry, made them regard the makers as destined by nature to be their handicraftsmen. They were convinced that the power and wealth of the world had centered in Spain and her colonies. A dull and patient sense of the inability and indolence of their despotic government afforded thein an easy and satisfactory explanation of their decay and degradation, without the least feeling of personal shame. Every individual preserved an exalted idea of himself, as a a Spaniard, and raised his abstract conception of Spain far above the rank which the Chinese give to their celestial empire. No untoward event could bring him down from this aerial height. * An insulting appellation commonly given to Frenchmen in Spain. The Spanish Spanish soldier felt as proud, when, at the first discharge of musketry, he ran away from his ranks, as the English platoons at Waterloo on seeing the French cavalry waver and fall back from their fire. Not a man, in the most numerous Spanish army, felt abashed after an uncontested defeat: and few, indeed, in the whole country, suspected their own honour to be concerned in the loss of the most decisive battle. The general threw the blame on the government, the officers on the general, the soldiers on the officers; and the people on government, generals, officers and soldiers; always saving the character and high rank of the Spanish nation. Never were the metaphysics of vanity, the abstracting powers of pride, carried to such lengths as in Spain. It is this national faculty of flying off from reality to imagination, of forgetting what they are, and glorying in what they have been and ought to be, that makes the Spaniards such a peculiar people. To it is Europe indebted for the resistance which, against every chance of success, they opposed to the ambition of Napoleon; but from it also arises the absurd policy by which they have lost the reward due to their sacrifices, and brought utter ruin upon themselves. For both argument and experience are powerless against that incurable pride, or, to describe it less harshly, that fine and lofty spirit, which has been depraved into a helpless and sullen obstinacy, by a long, long want of proper employment on the fit and natural objects of its aspirations. Spain might have retained the whole of her colonies, if not under her yoke, most certainly in her interest, if she had graciously yielded but a very small part of the claims, no part of which had she the power to withhold from them. But, even at this moment, when she scarcely retains a foot of ground in those countries, every genuine Spaniard feels in himself a natural and inherent right of dominion over the whole land between Mexico and Cape Horn. The enjoyment of this fanciful sovereignty is dearer to him than all the real advantages which a seasonable recognition might have procured for his country. Spain might have been at this moment in the actual possession of a political charter, under the guarantee of Great Britain and France, giving her more real freedom than the freest of her ancient kingdoms ever thought of.* But a constitution was proclaimed, which its authors • The kind of liberty enjoyed by the people of Arragon may be inferred from the fact that, in 1380, the Cortes of Zaragoza obliged the king to surrender some inhabitants of Auzanego, a village of the mountains of Jaca, whom he had taken under his protection on their complaining of ill treatment from a nobleman of the lowest rank. The Cortes declared, on this occasion, that it was the undoubted privilege of the Arragonese noblemen to treat their vasals as they pleased, and even to starve them to death and that the interferenee of the crown was a breach of the constitution.— Zurita, Anales de Aragon, lib. x. c. 28. and and abettors, in the national spirit we have described, regard as infinitely superior to all the schemes of government ever devised by man. To have altered a single article would have been to lose at once the mental raptures with which they contemplated its supereminent perfection. Rather, therefore, than bear this imaginary loss, they prepared themselves to leave their country entirely in the grasp of a despotism, which they had goaded into madness. They revelled for one day in the insults which the Cortes poured on the crowned heads, who had proposed the change; felt transported at the felicity of the poignant periods they had so undauntedly fired against the Holy Alliance, and carried the glory of this triumph to the lands of their exile, as more than an equivalent for their own and their country's misfortunes. There is too much real misery, we will add too much real nobleness in this infatuation, this intoxicating, yet disinterested vanity, to allow a smile or a sneer from any man of true feeling. But it must produce utter despondency in all who take an interest in the fate of a generous nation, thus doomed to perish by the obstinacy of her children. No change, no internal reaction can, for the present, improve her condition. The obstinate pride of the Spanish people, arrayed into two parties, each determined to sacrifice every real advantage to its ideal diguity, precludes all chance of accommodation. Spain must be governed exclusively and absolutely, either by the Apostolic Junta, or by a lodge of Comuneros: neither will yield a tittle of their pretensions, or admit the possibility of their being in the slightest error. moderate men are equally in danger from both; Ferdinand himself is threatened with conspiracies for being too liberal; and the only sensible statesmen who appeared at the helm during the late change, and have sacrificed their all to political consistency, are daily abused by their fellow-sufferers in exile, as traitors, serviles, and bigots; because they will not yet confess that, if that most perfect constitution of Cadiz failed to raise Spain above all past, present, and future nations, it was because the way was not prepared for it by putting every Spanish priest and nobleman to death, according to the truly orthodox doctrine of the good old Jacobins. The We have wandered far, in our affection for the Spanish name and nation, to excuse Don Esteban's want of accurate vision, by the unconquerable propensity of all his countrymen to see things, not as they are, but as they most flatter their vanity. But we are indeed at a loss to explain how his English partner in this work could expect that the most thoughtless watering-place reader in England would take the novel which he has provided as a kind of back-ground to the detached figures of his Spanish pupil, for part 03 part and parcel of a matter-of-fact history. Of the consistency and probability of this connecting narrative some idea may be formed from the following outline. At the general rising of Spain against Napoleon, Don Esteban, a lad of sixteen, took a commission in the Guerrilla service. At that age he is supposed to have attached himself to a lady still younger. This baby-house love is declared in a cave by the contrivance of the boys and girls of the family, affording the writer an opportunity to display his very best style. 'And may I hope' (says the Arcadian stripling) for nothing more than gratitude, dearest Isabella-may not the tenderest, the sincerest love hope for something more?-She made no reply, but she did not withdraw the hand I had taken, while her lovely face and neck were covered with blushes. A look, one look of those soft dark eyes left me nothing to wish for-the ecstasy of that moment was almost more than I could bear. I threw myself at her feet, imprinted a thousand kisses on her hand, and was half delirious with joy.' This is nothing to the intoxication' of the lover when, issuing from the cave, he and his Isabella join the other members of the nursery, who agree each to contribute a song to the general entertainment.' 'When Isabella's turn came, she made no difficulty, though she blushed, and her voice at first was not so steady as usual. As she sang, I know not which of the two enjoyed most that intoxicating pleasure produced by music and poetry-she in feeling and expressing the passion with images full of tenderness and beauty, assisted by all the enrapturing powers of melody; or I in catching those images, those sweet sounds, and more than all, those magic looks which hovered about my very soul.' Excellent! and still better for a philosophical analysis of such 'passionate fits of admiration:' in which we are informed that it is necessary to fall into one of them to understand whence arises the pride one feels at being the chosen object of the woman who excites it. All is accounted for then. It is not a human creature who plays on our heart-strings, it is a being superior to ourselves, who condescends to charm us.' Poor Don Esteban! we lament his choice-not of his Isabelita;-but of his English master in fine writing. Let us, however, proceed with the story. The love, which occasioned the above romantic scene, had originated in young Esteban's saving Isabella, and her uncle the Marquis of Moncayo, from four desperate assassins, whom Don Facundo, a brother of the Marquis, had sent to procure him the Moncayo estates, by the simple process of cutting the Marquis's throat. There existed, besides, a previous tie of friendship between the Marquis of Moncayo and Don Esteban's reputed father. Reputed |