ry department of its life, was becoming Latinized.

A people of rare intellectual activity had been united to the life
of Rome at the moment of her greatest intellectual elevation. Was
it strange that no Roman province ever produced so long a list of
historians, poets, philosophers, as did Southern Spain after the
Augustan conquest? When we read the list of great Roman authors who
were born in Spain--the three Senecas, one of whom, the author and
wit, opened his veins at the command of Nero (65 A.D.), and another,
the Gallio of the book of Acts; also Lucan, Martial, and Quintilian,
when we read these names native to Spain, it seems as if the source
of inspiration had removed from the banks of the Tiber to the banks of
the Guadalquivir.

Nowhere can the student of Roman antiquities find a richer field
than in Spain. And not only that, there is to-day in the manners and
customs, and in the habits of the peasantry, a pervading atmosphere of
the classic land which adopted them, which all that has occurred since
has been powerless to efface, while the language of Spain is Latin
to its core. Nor is this strange when we reflect that they were under
this powerful influence for a period as long as from Christopher
Columbus to the Spanish-American War!

CHAPTER V.

In the history of nations there is one fact which again and again with
startling uniformity repeats itself. The rough, strong races from the
north menace, and at last rudely dominate more highly civilized
but less hardy races at the South, to the ultimate benefit of both,
although with much present discomfort to the conquered race!

In Greece it was first the rude Hellenes who overran the Pelasgians.
And again, long after that, there was another descent of fierce
northern barbarians,--the Dorians from Epirus,--who, when they took
possession of the Peloponnesus and became the _Spartans_, infused that
vigorous strain without which the history of Greece might have been a
very tame affair. In the British Isles it was the Picts and Scots, who
would have done the same thing with England, perhaps, if the Angles
and Saxons had not come to the rescue, while Spain had her own Picts
and Scots in the mountain tribes of the Pyrenees. But in the fifth
century there was the most stupendous illustration of this tendency,
when all of Southern Europe was at last inundated by that northern
deluge, and the effete Roman Empire was effaced.

The process had been a gradual one