Spanish Life in Town and Country | Page 8

kings of Spain had brought her only ruin. With the Bourbons it was hoped a better era had opened, but it was only exchanging one form of misrule for another. The kings existed for their own benefit and pleasure; the people existed to minister to them and find funds for their extravagance. Each succeeding monarch was ruled by some upstart favourite, until the climax was reached when Godoy, the disgraceful Minister of Charles IV., and the open lover of his Queen, sold the country to Napoleon. Then indeed awoke the great heart of the nation, and Spain has the everlasting glory of having risen as one man against the French despot, and, by the help of England, stopped his mad career. Even then, under the base and contemptible Ferdinand VII., she underwent the "Terror of 1824," the disastrous and unworthy regency of Cristina, and the still worse rule of her daughter, Isabel II., before she awoke politically as a nation, and, her innumerable parties forming as one, drove out the Queen, with her camarilla of priests and bleeding nuns, and at last achieved her freedom.
For, whatever may be said of the last hundred years of Spain's history, it has been an advance, a continuous struggle for life and liberty. There had been fluctuating periods of progress. Charles III., a truly wise and patriotic monarch, the first since Ferdinand and Isabella, made extraordinary changes during his too short life. The population of the country rose a million and a half in the twenty-seven years of his reign, and the public revenue in like proportions under his enlightened Minister, Florida Blanca. No phase of the public welfare was neglected: savings banks, hospitals, asylums, free schools, rose up on all sides; vagrancy and mendicancy were sternly repressed; while men of science and skilled craftsmen were brought from foreign countries, and it seemed as if Spain had fairly started on her upward course. But he died before his time in 1788, and was followed by a son and grandson, who, with their wives, ruled by base favourites, dragged the honour of Spain in the dust. Still, the impulse had been given; there had been a break in the long story of misrule and misery; Mendiz��bal and Espartero scarcely did more than lighten the black canopy of cloud overhanging the country for a time; but at last came freedom, halting somewhat, as must needs be, but no longer to be repressed or driven back by the baneful influence known as palaci?, intrigues arising in the immediate circle of the Court.
CHAPTER II
TYPES AND TRAITS
It is the fashion to-day to minimise the influence of the Goths on the national characteristics of the Spaniard. We are told by some modern writers that their very existence is little more than a myth, and that the name of their last King, Roderick, is all that is really known about them. The castle of Wamba, or at least the hill on which it stood, is still pointed out to the visitor in Toledo, perched high above the red torrent of the rushing Tagus; but little seems to be certainly known of this hardy Northern race which, for some three hundred years, occupied the country after the Romans had withdrawn their protecting legions. On the approach of the all-conquering Moor, many of the inhabitants of Spain took refuge in the inaccessible mountains of the north, and were the ancestors of that invincible people known in Spain as "los Monta?eses," from whom almost all that is best in literature, as well as in business capacity, has sprung in later years.
How much of the Celt-Iberian, or original inhabitant of the Peninsula, and how much of Gothic or of Teuton blood runs in the veins of the people of the mountains, it is more than difficult now to determine. It had been impossible, despite laws and penalties, to prevent the intermingling of the races: all that we certainly know is that the inhabitants of Galicia, Asturias, Viscaya, Navarro, and Aragon have always exhibited the characteristics of a hardy, fighting, pushing race, as distinguished from the Andaluces, the Valencianos, the Murcianos, and people of Granada, in whom the languid blood of a Southern people and the more marked trace of Arabic heritage are apparent.
The Catalans would appear, again, to be descendants of the old Proven?als, at one time settled on both sides of the Pyrenees, though forming, at that time, part of Spain. Their language is almost pure Proven?al, and they differ, as history shows in a hundred ways, from the inhabitants of the rest of Spain. The Castilians, occupying the centre of the country, are what we know as "Spaniards," and may be taken to hold a middle place among these widely differing nationalities, modified by their contact with all. Their language is that of