nderstand
the enchantment that the emperor exercised over the bigoted and
ignorant people who worshipped the past. A great man that Don Carlos!
Brave in fight, astute in politics, jolly and hearty as one of the
burgomasters of his own country; a great eater, a great drinker, and
loving to catch the girls round the waist. But he had nothing Spanish
about him. He only appreciated his mother's heritage for what he could
wring out of it. Spain became a servant to Germany, ready to supply
as many men as were required, and to furnish loans and taxes. All the
exuberant life garnered in this country by Hispano-Arab culture
was absorbed by the north in less than a hundred years. The free
municipalities disappeared, their defenders went to the scaffold both
in Castille and Valencia; the Spaniard abandoned his plough or his
weaving to range the world with an arquebus on his shoulder, and the
town militias were transformed into bands which fought all over Europe
without knowing why. The flourishing towns became villages; churches
were turned into convents; the popular and tolerant clergy were
changed into friars who imitated with servile complacency the German
fanaticism. The fields remained barren for want of hands to cultivate
them, the poor dreamt of becoming rich from the sack of the enemy's
towns and left their work; the industrious burghers abandoned commerce
as only fit for heretics, and became nurseries of clerks and petty
magistrates; and the armies of Spain as unbeaten and glorious as they
were ragged, with no pay but pillage and in continual mutiny against
their chiefs, flooded our country with a swarm of wretched vagabonds,
from whence proceeded the bully, the beggar with his blunderbuss, the
highwayman, the wandering hermits, the starving nobleman, and all
those characters of which picturesque novels have availed themselves."

"But, the devil, Gabriel!" cried indignantly Silver Stick; "do you
deny that Don Carlos, who built the Alcazar of Toledo, and Don Philip
II., who lived in this very cloister, were two great kings?"

"I do not deny it; they were two extraordinary men, but they killed
Spain for ever. They were two foreigners, two Germans; Philip II.
clothed himself with a false Spaniardism to continue the German policy
of his father. This masquerading caused us great harm, because there
are many men now who think of him as the noblest representation of a
Spaniard. The absurd inventions and lapses from truth to whi