d not imagine himself a nobleman because
he was not of African descent. Not a half-starved, ignorant brigand,
gaining his living on the highways and byways by pilfering or
assassination, that did not kneel on the church pavement and listen to
orisons in an ancient tongue, of which he understood not a syllable, with
a sentiment of Christian self-complacency to which Godfrey of Bouillon
might have been a stranger. Especially those born towards the northern
frontier, and therefore farthest removed from Moorish contamination, were
proudest of the purity of their race. To be an Asturian or a Gallician,
however bronzed by sun and wind, was to be furnished with positive proof
against suspicion of Moorish blood; but the sentiment was universal
throughout the peninsula.

It followed as a matter of course that labour of any kind was an
impeachment against this gentility of descent. To work was the province
of Moors, Jews, and other heretics; of the Marani or accursed, miscreants
and descendants of miscreants; of the Sanbeniti or infamous, wretches
whose ancestors had been convicted by the Holy Inquisition of listening,
however secretly, to the Holy Scriptures as expounded by other lips than
those of Roman priests. And it is a remarkable illustration of this
degradation of labour and of its results, that in the reign of Philip
twenty-five thousand individuals of these dishonoured and comparatively
industrious classes, then computed at four millions in number in the
Castilian kingdoms alone, had united in a society which made a formal
offer to the king to pay him two thousand dollars a head if the name and
privileges of hidalgo could be conferred upon them. Thus an
inconsiderable number of this vilest and most abject of the
population--oppressed by taxation which was levied exclusively upon the
low, and from which not only the great nobles but mechanics and other
hidalgos were, exempt--had been able to earn and to lay by enough to
offer the monarch fifty millions of dollars to purchase themselves out of
semi-slavery into manhood, and yet found their offer rejected by an
almost insolvent king. Nothing could exceed the idleness and the
frivolity of the upper classes, as depicted by contemporary and not
unfriendly observers. The nobles were as idle and as ignorant as their
inferiors. They were not given to tournays nor to the delights of the
chase and table, but were fond of brilliant festivities, dancing,
gambling, masquerading, love