aristocracy. "Every Spaniard was
a warrior, every warrior a noble, and every noble a knight of his
country."[16] They had not to go far to seek for adventures. They had the
Paynim at home: Mahound and Termagaunt were at their doors. There was a
constant supply at hand of men of the wrong faith and alien habits--the
delight in fighting whom was enhanced by the fact that they equally were
possessed of the chivalric fervor, and, though Moors and misbelievers,
gentlemen still and cavaliers.[17] The long and desperate struggle for
existence evolved the highest qualities of the race. And small wonder it
was that out of that fruitful soil which had grown the Cid and the
warriors of the heroic age, who should be rightly classed as prechivalric,
there sprung up that ranker produce, the knights-errant. Of these, the
seekers after adventure, the bohemians of the knightly order, Spain, as
her native historians boast, was the teeming mother. No other country in
that age, or in the previous one, could show the world such a scene as
that gravely enacted before King Juan II and his court, when eighty
knights ran a-tilt with each other, and incurred serious loss of limb and
permanent injury to their persons, in order that one of them might fulfil
a fantastic vow made to his mistress.[18]

[16] See the eloquent and judicious prologue to his _Romancero
General_ by Don Agustin Duran.

[17] "Caballeros granadinos,
Aunque Moros, hijos d'algo."

[18] See the account of the Paso Honroso, held at the instance of
Suero de Quinones, before Juan II, in 1434, at the bridge of
Orbigo, near Leon, which is contained in Appendix D, vol. i, of my
translation of _Don Quixote_.

Knight-errantry, which was a caprice in France and in England, in Spain
was a calling. No other country could afford such a field for it, and to
no other society was it so well suited. The grave and wise Fernando de
Pulgar, the counsellor and chronicler of Ferdinand and Isabella, speaks
with complacency of the noblemen he knew who had gone into foreign
countries in search of adventures, "so as to gain honor for themselves,
and the fame of valiant and hardy knights for the gentlemen of
Castile"--boasting that there were more Spanish knights of the errant
sort than of any other nation.

The romance of chivalry was the natural growth of this fashion of
knight-errantry; and, like its parent, flourished nowhere so luxuriantly
a