groping for the churches
and monuments in suddenly opening squares, to console the sentimental
tourist for the havoc which enterprise has made. The mind readily goes
back through these to the palmy prehistoric times from which the town
emerged to mention in Ptolemy, and then begins to work forward past
Iberian and Roman and Goth and Moor to the Castilian kings who made it
their residence in the eleventh century. The capital won its first
great distinction when Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile were
married there in 1469. Thirty-five years later these Catholic Kings,
as one had better learn at once to call them in Spain, let Columbus die
neglected if not forgotten in the house recently pulled down, where he
had come to dwell in their cold shadow; they were much occupied with
other things and they could not realize that his discovery of America
was the great glory of their reign; probably they thought the conquest
of Granada was. Later yet, by twenty years, the dreadful Philip II.
was born in Valladolid, and in 1559 a very famous _auto da fe_ wag
celebrated in the Plaza Mayor. Fourteen Lutherans were burned alive for
their heresy, and the body of a woman suspected of imperfect orthodoxy
after her death was exhumed and burned with them. In spite of such
precautions as these, and of all the pious diligence of the Holy Office,
the reader will hardly believe that there is now a Spanish Protestant
church in Valladolid; but such is the fact, though whether it derives
from the times of the Inquisition, or is a modern missionary church I
do not know. That _auto da fe_ was of the greatest possible distinction;
the Infanta Juana presided, and the universal interest was so great that
people paid a dollar and twenty-five cents a seat; money then worth five
or six times as much as now. Philip himself came to another _auto_ when
thirteen persons were burned in the same place, and he always liked
Valladolid; it must have pleased him in a different way from Escorial,
lying flat as it does on a bare plain swept, but never thoroughly
dusted, by winds that blow pretty constantly over it.

While the Inquisition was purging the city of error its great university
was renowning it not only throughout Spain, but in France and Italy;
students frequented it from those countries, and artists came from many
parts of Europe. Literature also came in the person of Cervantes,
who seems to have followed the Spanish court in its migrations from