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 Caesars.

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 an