fies so strongly
to the weakness of a first-class power as the Revolution of Portugal.
Though Portugal lay at the very door of Spain, that country slipped from
her feeble hands, and she never could recover it. Having resumed her
encroaching, domineering course before she had fairly recovered her
strength, she broke down in less than a quarter of a century, though
even then the full extent of her weakness was not generally understood.
It is an amusement to read works that were written in the reigns of
Philip IV. and Charles II., in which Spain is spoken of as a great
power, and to compare the words of their writers with the actual facts
of the case. If we were to fix upon any one date as indicating the final
breaking down of Austrian Spain, it would be the year 1659, when the
treaty of the Pyrenees was made, and when the old rival of France became
virtually her vassal. From that time we must date the beginning of that
strange interference in Spanish affairs which has formed so much of the
public business of France, whereby one of the proudest of peoples have
become, as it were, provincials to one of the vainest of peoples. It is
true that there were more wars between Austrian Spain and France, but
they served only to show that the former had lost the power to contend
with her rival, who might look forward to the day when the empire of
Philip II. should fall to pieces, and furnish spoil to those strong
nations that watch over the beds of sick men in purple.

The state of decay in which the first Bourbon king of Spain found his
inheritance, in 1701, is well known. The War of the Succession soon
followed, and Spain was shorn of some of her most magnificent foreign
possessions. All that she had held in Flanders was lost,--and so were
Naples, and Sicily, and Sardinia, and the Milanese, and other lands that
had been ruled, and wellnigh ruined, by the Austro-Burgundian kings. The
English had Gibraltar, and were holding Minorca also. Bourbon Spain was
not to be Austrian Spain,--that was clear. But this trimming and pruning
of the Peninsular monarchy were very useful to it; and Spain, having
been ploughed up by the sword for twelve successive years, was in
condition to yield something beyond what it had produced since the death
of Philip II. Accordingly, under the ascendency of the Italian Alberoni,
Spain became rapidly powerful; and could that remarkable statesman have
confined his labors to affairs purely Spanish in their charac