Writers of to-day, in England and America, continue to repeat the old parrot cries; they appear to be wholly ignorant of the work that has been done by Spanish critical historians and archæologists. For them Prescott is still an authority on fifteenth-century Spain; Dahn has said the last word-some thirty-four years ago-on the Visigothic kingdom; Gayangos is the only historian they know of touching the Saracen occupation, though he wrote before the Revolution of 1868 had let light in through the darkened windows of his country's records, and he was not even allowed to see the Arabic MSS. in the Escorial, because he wrote in English.

It is especially in regard to the earlier times, for instance those of the Moorish invasion and conquest, on which the labours of men like Don Eduardo Saavedra have thrown so much light, that this complaint may with justice be made. But it is also true of later periods; indeed Spain, which had so much interest for the generation which had lived through the Peninsular War, and for its successor, has been unaccountably neglected by English writers during the last fifty years.

It was a curiously complex character which was manifested by the Spanish people when, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, we find them ground down under their alien rulers, with a feeble, though amiable, king completely in the hands of his contemptible wife and her paramour, Godoy; the heir to the throne at one moment conspiring against his father, at another grovelling in a feigned repentance and betraying his fellow conspirators, to shield himself, more base and false than it is possible to conceive, and yet the idol of the people, who credited him with every virtue because they saw in him a saviour from the disgrace which overhung the court. The state of ignorance was appalling. For four centuries Spain had been ground under the iron heel of the Inquisition, every impulse to enlightenment trodden under foot, and the grossest superstition not only encouraged but actually enforced under cruel conditions. Such was the country which Charles IV left when he and his ignoble son, in whose favour he had abdicated, became prisoners to Napoleon, and the nation rose, in spite of its treacherous rulers, in defence of country and liberty.

Broadly speaking, the first sixty-eight years of the

nineteenth century in Spain were years of a continuous fight for liberty and light, a fight which often seemed so absolutely hopeless that one stands amazed at the persistence of her sons, who, cajoled, betrayed, murdered, and courted by turns, as the powers of darkness gained the upper hand or were compelled to give way, still held on, fresh fighters closing the ranks as their comrades fell, until at last, in a bloodless revolution, they gained their freedom. Much exaggeration and many grievous mistakes were still to come; but after the trial of one elected monarch and the absurd republic, which made the country for a time the laughing-stock of Europe, the restoration of Alfonso XII, by the choice of his people, brought at last settled government, resulting in an advance in education, commerce, and industry, which give the happiest promise for the future.

A good history of Spain has been very much wanted, and perhaps it would have been difficult to find a man in every way better fitted to undertake the task than the late Mr Butler Clarke, whose work, though published posthumously, has had the benefit of much loving care, in its passage through the press, from some of the many friends who mourn his untimely death. Although his sympathies are strongly conservative, and he carries his English prejudices more than once into the widely differing politics of a country which had for long nothing good to conserve, and whose only hope for life lay in a struggle against absolutism and its accompanying ignorance, his judgments are, with few exceptions, fair and just; and it would be difficult to find within the compass of so small a book a truer picture of the period concerned. We shall, however, call attention to one or two cases in which the author appears to have accepted the views of, probably, personal friends too much affected by the political feuds which are so common in Spain to be fair judges of the characters of those opposed to them.

In a short and naturally somewhat breathless introductory chapter, Mr Butler Clarke covers the ground from the time of Philip V (1700) to the restoration of Ferdinand VII in 1814; but it must be said that the summary, short as it is, is masterly. The Peninsular War, the period of Spanish history best known to English readers, is to a great extent taken as read; but the

author briefly shows the condition to which the people had been reduced by their alien rulers, beginning with Charles I (the Emperor Charles V), who introduced absolutism into the country by doing away with its ancient Cortes and all other guarantees, and substituting his personal decrees, without any consent of the people. He was followed so closely in this policy by his successors that during the whole of the eighteenth century the Cortes of Castile only met six times, and then were only allowed to confirm the personal mandates of the monarch already in force. It is well to remember, in this connexion, that the plea of legitimacy or divine right put forward by Don Carlos and his successors rests solely on such a personal mandate of Philip IV, wherein he attempted to set aside the law of succession, endeared to the people by the memory of three great queens- -a mandate never sanctioned by the Cortes, and annulled by Charles IV.

Looking back over the whole history of the country, with the aid of the critical writers of to-day, one is justified in asking whether the extraordinary deterioration in the character of the people, which made them such an easy prey to the tyranny and extortion of the Crown and the Church in the eighteenth century, may not be ascribed to the mixture of races which took place after the completion of the reconquest, when the warlike and independent northern people were amalgamated with the Mozárabes, who had tamely submitted to the Saracens, and had to a great extent intermarried and formed a mixed race, largely impregnated with Arab blood, and that at a time when the Saracens themselves had become degenerate and feeble.

The introduction of the Burgundian Court tradition by Charles I, with its immense and useless crowd of hangers-on, led to shameless corruption, which was barely swept away even in the great revolution; this corruption among the official class has been the worst bane of the country in the nineteenth century, and dies hard even now. 'Here,' says Galdós, perhaps the most popular writer of the day in Spain, and one who knows his countrymen as scarcely any other does, 'the people do not know what an idea is; only the overwhelming sentiments of love for their land and of God can move them.

To speak to them in any other language is to waste words.' It was only when Spain was invaded and her crown annexed that the heart of the people was touched, and they rose as one man and sacrificed all that they possessed to free their beloved land from the hated 'Intruder.' During the disgraceful captivity of Ferdinand VII, ideas among the more cultivated classes had moved more quickly. The Cortes of Cadiz was a loyal attempt to introduce a government somewhat in accordance with the spirit of the age. The constitution of 1812 was not one to arouse admiration in the minds of practical politicians of a later day; but it stood for liberty, and it became as much a rallying-cry to one-half of the nation as King and Religion' was to the other. The great revolution had begun which it took nearly sixty years to bring to fruition.

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a

This then was the country to which Ferdinand, master of dissimulation' and a man without a spark of honour, returned. He was to rule over a people already widely differing from that which he had left a few years before, though it is perhaps an overstatement to say that 'old Spain fell with the French invasion, undermined by the reforms of Charles III.' Ferdinand quickly lost the title of Well-beloved,' as his people discovered that he broke every promise as soon as made,and kept faith with no one. The wholesale arrest of all the prominent Liberals and the members of the Cortès of Cadiz, and even of the secretaries of State, on the morrow of the day on which he had publicly promised to summon Cortes, and had said, 'I hate and abhor despotism; the intelligence of Europe no longer suffers it,' was only a foretaste of the methods which he intended to pursue. The expatriation of twelve thousand of the 'Josefinos'-those who had accepted Joseph Bonaparte as king-was perhaps not an unpopular step; but his faithful people found that they were actually in a much worse plight than when Godoy had been master, and their liberties were further than ever from being protected.

Perhaps the only thing that could be said in Ferdinand's favour-and it certainly contributed to the more favourable judgment which he has received in later days. -is that he never fell under the influence of a favourite. His profound contempt for the adulators and time-servers

who surrounded him was, if possible, greater than that felt for them by his people. He treated them like dogs, giving them tit-bits when he felt inclined, and kicking them aside when his mood changed. Nor was he any better with his ministers; and, though they were only five in number at any one time, no less than thirty came and went in the six years from 1814 to 1820, many of them having been raised from the lowest ranks and being in no way fitted for their posts. It seemed as if, in his sardonic humour, he liked to make official position as contemptible as possible, and himself to cast ridicule on the idea of government of any kind. Meanwhile 'a new generation was growing up, schooled by harsh oppression to a fanaticism in the cause of liberty as exaggerated as that of their opponents in regard to absolutism.' The country was, to all appearance, cowed into quiescence; but the exiles were learning, chiefly in England, what liberty under a settled constitutional government might be.

Between 1814 and 1820 no less than thirteen attempts at revolution took place. That with which the name of Riego is associated (in 1820) was important enough to bring the King, who was as great a coward as a bully, to his knees; and Ferdinand took the oath to observe the constitution, an oath which he had never any intention of keeping, and which he broke as soon as was practicable. It must be confessed that between this period and that of 1824, known as 'The Terror,' when the King was rescued by French bayonets from the hands of his own subjects, he had good reason to complain. It is scarcely a matter for wonder-for the same laws govern all popular revolt against persistent tyranny; and we have an object-lesson before us in Russia to-day-that there was gross exaggeration in the swing of the pendulum, that many and often deplorable mistakes were made. The traditions of self-government, once so marked in the northern kingdom, had been completely lost after the amalgamation with the south; and gradually the party which called itself Exaltado,' otherwise the extreme Radicals, anxious to pull down without the least idea of how to build up, had gained the upper hand over the 'Doceañistas' or moderate constitutionalists, the supporters of the constitution of 1812.

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Riego is remembered chiefly from the hymn which