there, all the pleasure that may be
derived from it, and to feel with those who, knowing the country and its
people intimately, love it dearly, a remembrance of its past history and
of its strange agglomeration of nationalities is absolutely necessary;
nor can any true idea be formed of the country from a mere acquaintance
with any one of its widely differing provinces. Galicia is, even to-day,
more nearly allied to Portugal than to Spain, and it was only in 1668
that the independence of the former was acknowledged, and it became a
separate kingdom.

With all rights now equalised, the inhabitants of the remaining
provinces of Spain differ as widely from one another as they do from the
sister kingdom, while the folklore of Asturias and of the Basque
Provinces is very closely allied with that of Portugal. To judge the
Biscayan by the same standard as the Andaluz, is as sensible as it would
be to compare the Irish squatter with Cornish fisher-folk, or the
peasants of Wilts and Surrey with the Celtic races of the West Highlands
of Scotland, or even with the people of Lancashire or Yorkshire.

Nor is it possible to speak of Spain as a whole, and of what she is
likely to make of the present impulse towards national growth and
industrial prosperity, without remembering that her population counts,
among its rapidly increasing numbers, the far-seeing and business-like,
if somewhat selfish, Catalan, with a language of his own; the dreamy,
pleasure-loving Andaluz; the vigorous Basque, whose distinctive language
is not to be learned or understood by the people of any other part of
Spain; the half-Moorish Valencian and the self-respecting Aragonese, who
have always made their mark in the history of their country, and were
looked upon as a foreign element in the days when their kingdom and that
of Leon were united, under one crown, with Castile. It was only after
Alfonso XII. had stamped out the last Carlist war that the ancient
_fueros_, or special rights, of the Basque Provinces became a thing of
the past, and their people liable to conscription, on a par with all the
other parts of Spain.

Every student of history knows that the era of Spain's greatness was
that of _Los Reyes Catolicos_, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of
Aragon, when the wonderful discovery and opening up of a new world made
her people dizzy with excitement, and seemed to promise steadily
increasing power and influence. Everyone knows that these dreams were