both when it would have been possible that this want should be supplied.

For us, who behold SPAIN only in the depth of her present bankruptcy, literal and figurative, it is difficult to realize the lofty elevation of power, and dignity, and honor, at which she stood in the sixteenth century, and, while as yet the secret of her decadence was not divined, during a portion of the seventeenth; the extent to which the Spaniard was honored with the fear, the admiration, and the hatred, of the rest of Europe. That sixteenth had been for him a century of achievements almost without a parallel. At the close of the century preceding, the Christians of Spain had brought their long conflict with the infidel at home to a triumphant close. But these eight hundred years of strife had impressed their stamp deeply on the national character. "As iron sharpeneth iron," so had this long collision of races and religions evoked many noble qualities in the Spaniard, but others also most capable of dangerous abuse. War with the infidel, in one shape or another, had become almost a necessity of the national mind. The Spanish cavalier might not be moral, but religious, according to that distinction between morality and religion possible in Roman catholic countries, he always must be, by the same necessity that, to be a gentleman, he must be well born, and courteous, and brave.

The field for the exercise of this Christian chivalry

at home was no sooner closed to him, than other and wider fields were opened. Granada was taken in 1492; in the very same year Columbus discovered a New World, to the conquering of which the Spaniard advanced quite as much in the spirit of a crusader as of a gold-seeker; and we wrong him altogether, at least such men as Cortez, if we believe that only the one passion was real, while the other was assumed. All exploits of fabled heroes of romance were outdone by the actual deeds of these conquerors-deeds at the recital of which the world, so long as it has admiration for heroic valor and endurance, or indignation for pitiless cruelty, will shudder and wonder. But this valor was not all to be lavished, nor these cruelties to be practised, on a scene remote from European eyes. The years during which Cortez was slowly winning his way to the final conquest of the Mexican empire, were exactly the earliest years of the Reformation in Europe (1518–1521). This Reformation, adopted by the north of Europe, repelled by the south, was by none so energetically repelled as by the Spaniards, who henceforward found a sphere wide as the whole civilized world in which to make proof that they were the most Christian of all Christian nations, the most catholic of all catholic. Spain did not shrink from her part as champion of the periled faith, but accepted eagerly the glories and the sacrifices which this championship entailed. Enriched by the boundless wealth of the Western world, having passed in

Philip the Second's time from freedom into despotism, and bringing the energies, nursed in freedom, to be wielded with the unity which despotism possesses, she rose during the sixteenth century ever higher and higher in power and consideration.

It was toward the end of that century—that is, when Lope de Vega took possession of the rude drama of his country, and with the instincts of genius strengthened and enlarged, without disturbing, the old foundations of it-that the great epoch of her drama began. All that went before was but as the attempts of Kid and Peele, or at the utmost of Marlowe, in ours. The time was favorable for his appearance. Spain must, at this time, have been waiting for her poet. The restless activity which had pushed her forward in every quarter, the spirit of enterprise which had discovered and won an empire in the New World, while it had attached to her some of the fairest provinces and kingdoms of the Old, was somewhat subsiding. She was willing to repose upon her laurels. The wish had risen up to enjoy the fruits of her long and glorious toils; to behold herself, and what was best and highest in her national existence, those ideals after which she had been striving, reflected back upon her in the mirrors which art would supply; for she owed her drama to that proud epoch of national history which was just concluding, as truly as Greece owed the great burst of hers, all which has made it to live for ever, to the Persian war, and to the eleva

tion consequent on its successful and glorious conclusion. The dramatic poet found everything ready to his hand. Here was a nation proud of itself, of its fidelity to the catholic faith, of its championship, at all sacrifices, of that faith; possessing a splendid past history at home and abroad—a history full of incident, of passion, of marvel, and of suffering-much of that history so recent as to be familiar to all, and much which was not recent, yet familiar as well, through ballad and romance, which everywhere lived on the lips of the people. Here was a nation which had set before itself, and in no idle pretence, the loftiest ideals of action; full of the punctilios of valor, of honor, of loyalty; a generation to whom life, their own life, or the life of those dearest, was as dust in the balance compared with the satisfying to the utmost tittle the demands of these; so that one might say that what Sir Philip Sidney has so beautifully called "the hate-spot ermeline"-the ermine that rather dies than sullies its whiteness with one spot or stain was the model they had chosen. Here was a society which had fashioned to itself a code of ethics, which, with all of lofty and generous that was in it, was yet often exaggerated, perverted, fantastic, inexorable, bloody; but which claimed unquestioning submission from all, and about obeying which no hesitation of a moment might occur. What materials for

the dramatic poet were here!

Nor may we leave out of sight that there were cir

cumstances, which modified and rendered less fatal than we might have expected they would prove, even those influences that were manifestly hostile to the free development of genius in Spain. Thus it is quite true that Spain may be said finally to have passed from a land of constitutional freedom into a despotism, with the crushing by Philip II. of the liberties of Aragon. But for all this, the mighty impulses of the free period which went before, did not immediately fail. It is not for a generation or two that despotism effectually accomplishes its work, and shows its power in cramping, dwarfing, and ultimately crushing, the faculties of a people. The nation lives for a while on what has been gained in nobler epochs of its life; and it is not till this is exhausted, till the generation which was reared in a better time has passed away, and also the generation which they have formed and moulded under the not yet extinct traditions of freedom, that all the extent of the spiritual, moral, and intellectual mischief, becomes apparent. Moreover, it must not be lost sight of that the Spanish was not an anti-national despotism, such as the English would have been if Charles I. had succeeded in his attempt to govern without parliaments. On the contrary, it was a despotism in which the nation gloried; which itself helped forward. It was consequently one in which the nation did not feel that humiliation and depression, which are the results of one running directly counter to the national feeling, and being the