h
year, nourishment would remain to animate the declamations of preachers,
and the energies of the faithful; without which the fatal effects of
sloth and indifference must inevitably take root in the imaginations,
and eventually undermine their lofty fabric.

The decline was, however, so gradual as to exercise no perceptible
influence on the general conduct of the population, by whom forms were
still observed, churches filled, and acts of devotion unceasingly
accomplished. A variety of causes (into a description of which it is not
my object, nor would it be your wish, that I should enter, but of which
one of the most influential has been the importation of foreign
ideas--as well through natural channels, as by special and interested
exertions) has precipitated the _denouement_ of this long-commenced
revolution; and that with so headlong a rapidity, that, in that Spain
which surpassed all other nations in bigoted attachment to religious
rites, the confiscation of all the possessions of the Church, under a
promise (not to be performed) of salaries for a certain number of
ecclesiastics, insufficient for the continuation of the ancient
ceremonies, is received by the population with indifference! The
Cathedral of Toledo, deprived of the greater number of its
functionaries,--including its archbishop and fifty-six of its sixty
canons, and no longer possessing, out of an income of hundreds of
thousands sterling, a treasure sufficient for providing brooms and
sweepers for its pavement,--will, in perhaps not much more than another
year, if the predictions of the inhabitants be verified, be finally
closed to public worship.

The same interest, therefore, which surrounded the Arab monuments three
centuries since, and the Roman edifices of Spain in the fifth century,
attaches itself now to the Christian temples; which, at this crisis,
offer themselves to the tourist in the sad but attractive gloom of
approaching death; since depriving them of the pomp and observances
which filled their tall arcades with animation, is equivalent to
separating a soul from a body. He will explore them and examine their
ceremonies with all the eagerness and perseverance of a last
opportunity,--he will wander untired through the mysterious twilight of
their arched recesses, and muse on the riches lavished around him to so
little purpose, and on the hopes of those who entrusted their memories
to the guardianship of so frail and transient a depositary. T