t your anger; you repeat what you have been taught. There are people
here of the highest education who are not less irritated if you touch
what they call their golden age. The fault is in the education that
is given in this country. All history is a lie, and to know it so
misrepresented it would be far better not to know it at all. In the
schools the past of the country is taught from the point of view of a
savage, who appreciates a thing because it shines and not because of
its worth or utility. Spain was great, and was on the high road to
become the first nation in the world, by solid and positive merits
that the hazards of war or policy could not have destroyed; but that
was before the centuries that you praise, before the times of the
foreign kings: in the Middle Ages which held great hopes, which have
vanished since the consolidation of national unity. Our Middle Ages
produced a cultivated, industrious and civilised people like none
other in the world; they had in them the materials for the building of
a great nation; but foreign architects came in who hastily ran up this
edifice; those first few years of existence that astound you with the
splendour of novelty, and among whose ruins we are still groping."

Gabriel forgot all his prudence in the ardour of discussion. He felt
no fear of Silver Stick, with his manner of an inquisitor incapable of
reasoning. He wished to convince him; he felt all the fervour, all the
irresistible impulse of his proselytising days, without trying in any
way to disguise his feelings from consideration of the atmosphere
surrounding him. Don Antolin listened to him in astonishment, fixing
on him his cold glance. The others listened, feeling confusedly the
marvel that such ideas should be enunciated in the cloister of a
cathedral. Don Martin, the chaplain of the nuns, who stood behind his
miserly protector, showed in his eyes the eager sympathy with which he
heard Luna's words.

He described the Hispano-Roman people over whom the Gothic invasion
swept, without, however, causing a gap, because before long the
conquerors had succumbed to the lower Latin degeneration, remaining
without strength, spending themselves in theological struggles and
dynastic intrigues like those of Byzantium. The regeneration of Spain
did not come from the north with the hordes of barbarians, but from
the south with the invading Arabs. At first they were few, but they
were sufficient to conquer Roderick and his co