d
and its vanities.

Yet these reverses made little impression on Spain. The sounds of war
died away before they reached the foot of the Pyrenees. Spain, it is
true, sent forth her sons, from time to time, to serve under the banners
of Charles; and it was in that school that was perfected the admirable
system of discipline and tactics which, begun by the Great Captain, made
the Spanish infantry the most redoubtable in Europe. But the great body
of the people felt little interest in the success of these distant
enterprises, where success brought them no good. Not that the mind of
Spain was inactive, or oppressed with the lethargy which stole over it
in a later age. There was, on the contrary, great intellectual activity.
She was excluded, by an arbitrary government, from pushing her
speculations in the regions of theological or political science. But
this, to a considerable extent, was the case with most of the
neighboring nations; and she indemnified herself for this exclusion by a
more diligent cultivation of elegant literature. The constellation of
genius had already begun to show itself above the horizon, which was to
shed a glory over the meridian and the close of Philip's reign. The
courtly poets in the reign of his father had confessed the influence of
Italian models, derived through the recent territorial acquisitions in
Italy. But the national taste was again asserting its supremacy; and the
fashionable tone of composition was becoming more and more accommodated
to the old Castilian standard.

It would be impossible that any departure from a national standard
should be long tolerated in Spain, where the language, the manners, the
dress, the usages of the country, were much the same as they had been
for generations,--as they continued to be for generations, long after
Cervantes held up the mirror of fiction, to reflect the traits of the
national existence more vividly than is permitted to the page of the
chronicler. In the rude _romances_ of the fourteenth and the fifteenth
century, the Castilian of the sixteenth might see his way of life
depicted with tolerable accuracy. The amorous cavalier still thrummed
his guitar, by moonlight, under the balcony of his mistress, or wore her
favors at the Moorish tilt of reeds. The common people still sung their
lively _seguidillas_, or crowded to the _fiestas de toros_,--the cruel
bull-fights,--or to the more cruel _autos da fe_. This last spectacle,
of comparatively recen