all the
wide-spread and heterogeneous territories subject to the Spanish sceptre
is the striking phenomenon of the present epoch. The distribution of such
wealth as was still created followed the same laws which had long
prevailed, while the decay and national paralysis, of which the
prognostics could hardly be mistaken, were a natural result of the
system.

The six archbishops had now grown to eleven, and still received gigantic
revenues; the income of the Archbishop of Toledo, including the fund of
one hundred thousand destined for repairing the cathedral, being
estimated at three hundred thousand dollars a year, that of the
Archbishop of Seville and the others varying from one hundred and fifty
thousand dollars to fifty thousand. The sixty-three bishops perhaps
averaged fifty thousand a year each, and there were eight more in Italy.

The commanderies of chivalry, two hundred at least in number, were
likewise enormously profitable. Some of them were worth thirty thousand a
year; the aggregate annual value being from one-and-a-half to two
millions, and all in Lerma's gift, upon his own terms.

Chivalry, that noblest of ideals, without which, in some shape or
another, the world would be a desert and a sty; which included within
itself many of the noblest virtues which can adorn mankind--generosity,
self-denial, chastity, frugality, patience, protection to the feeble, the
downtrodden, and the oppressed; the love of daring adventure, devotion to
a pure religion and a lofty purpose, most admirably pathetic, even when
in the eyes of the vulgar most fantastic--had been the proudest and most
poetical of Spanish characteristics, never to be entirely uprooted from
the national heart.

Alas! what was there in the commanderies of Calatrava, Alcantara,
Santiago, and all the rest of those knightly orders, as then existing, to
respond to the noble sentiments on which all were supposed to be founded?
Institutions for making money, for pillaging the poor of their
hard-earned pittance, trafficked in by greedy ministers and needy
courtiers with a shamelessness which had long ceased to blush at vices
however gross, at venality however mean.

Venality was in truth the prominent characteristic of the Spanish polity
at this epoch. Everything political or ecclesiastical, from highest to
lowest, was matter of merchandize.

It was the autocrat, governing king and kingdom, who disposed of
episcopal mitres, cardinals' hats, commanders' c