city walls; but the Spanish freedman of Augustus, Gaius
Julius Hyginus, had been made the chief keeper of the Palatine Library,
and Ballus, another Spaniard, had reached the consulship, and had been
accorded the honour of a public triumph. Hadrian, again, was a
Spaniard, and Marcus Aurelius a son of Córdoba. No wonder that
Spain is proud to remember that, of the "eighty perfect golden years"
which Gibbon declares to have been the happiest epoch in mankind's
history, no less than sixty were passed beneath the sceptre of her
Cæsars.
The conquered had become conquerors; the intermarriage of Roman
soldiers and settlers with Spanish women modified the original race;
the Iberians invaded the politics and the literature of their conquerors.
St. Augustine mourned the odiosa cantio of Spanish children learning
Latin, but the language of Rome itself was altered by its Iberian
emperors and literati; the races, in fact, amalgamated, and the Spaniard
of to-day, to those who know him well, bears a strange resemblance to
the Roman citizens with whom the letters of the Younger Pliny so
charmingly make us familiar. The dismemberment of the Roman
Empire left Spain exposed to the inroads of the Northern barbarians,
and led indirectly to the subsequent Moorish inrush; for the Jews,
harassed by a severe penal code, hailed the Arabs as a kindred race; and
with their slaves made common cause with the conquering hordes.
The Goths seem to have been little more than armed settlers in the
country. Marriage between them and the Iberians was forbidden by
their laws, and the traces of their occupation are singularly few: not a
single inscription or book of Gothic origin remains, and it seems
doubtful if any trace of the language can be found in Castilian or any of
its dialects. It is strange, if this be true, that there should be so strong a
belief in the influence of Gothic blood in the race.
In all these wars and rumours of war the men of the hardy North
remained practically unconquered. The last to submit to the Roman, the
first to throw off the yoke of the Moor, the Basques and Asturians
appear to be the representatives of the old inhabitants of Spain, who
never settled down under the sway of the invader or acquiesced in
foreign rule. Cicero mentions a Spanish tongue which was
unintelligible to the Romans; was this Basque, which is equally so now
to the rest of Spain, and which, if you believe the modern Castilian, the
devil himself has never been able to master?
The history of Spain is one to make the heart ache. Some evil influence,
some malign destiny, seems ever to have brought disaster where her
people looked for progress or happiness. Her golden age was just in the
short epoch when Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon reigned
and ruled over the united kingdoms: both were patriotic, both clever,
and absolutely at one in their policy. It is almost impossible to us who
can look back on the long records, almost always sad and disastrous,
not to doubt whether in giving a new world "to Castile and Aragon,"
Cristobal Colon did not impose a burden on the country of his adoption
which she was unable to bear, and which became, in the hands of the
successors of her muy Españoles y muy Católicos kings, a curse instead
of a blessing. Certain it is that Spain was not sufficiently advanced in
political economy to understand or cope with the enormous changes
which this opening up of a new world brought about. The sudden
increase of wealth without labour, of reward for mere adventure, slew
in its infancy any impulse there might have been to carry on the
splendid manufactures and enlightened agriculture of the Moors; trade
became a disgrace, and the fallacious idea that bringing gold and silver
into a country could make it rich and prosperous ate like a canker into
the industrial heart of the people, and with absolute certainty threw
them backward in the race of civilisation.
Charles V. was the first evil genius of Spain; thinking far more of his
German and Italian possessions than of the country of his mother, poor
mad Juana, he exhausted the resources of Spain in his endless wars
outside the country, and inaugurated her actual decline at a moment
when, to the unthinking, she was at the height of her glory. The
influence of the powerful nobility of the country had been completely
broken by Isabella and Ferdinand, and the device of adopting the
Burgundian fashion of keeping at the Court an immense crowd of
nobles in so-called "waiting" on the Monarch flattered the national
vanity, while it ensured the absolute inefficacy of the class when it
might have been useful in stemming the baneful absolutism
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