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SPANISH CHARACTER.

Such," said Mr. Delville,

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66 were the sentiments

of the sage; but poetry has its own delusions; and though nothing can be more just than these abstract notions on the vanity of human wishes and human schemes, yet humble mortals, like ourselves, may be permitted to consider them in a less elevated point of view. The character of the Spaniards is a strange mixture of greatness and indolence, pride and generosity. They are naturally grave, and more inclined to value solid than specious qualifications. They do not prize imagination so much as judgment; and are totally free from that levity and love of external show which distinguish the French. During the splendid era of their history, they made a very considerable figure in learning and literature; but the injuririous influence of the Inquisition, by prohibiting books, has destroyed, in a great measure, the taste for reading; and to this cause we must attribute the want of acquired information which is universal in Spain, even amongst individuals remarkable for the natural acuteness of their understandings. The most prominent feature of the Spanish character is a spirit of bigotry and religious intolerance. This may be said to be the genius of the people; but it is accounted for by their history.

"Spain, which had successively belonged to the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, and Romans, was van

6 CONQUEST OF SPAIN BY THE ARABS.

quished by the Visigoths, and remained for three centuries under their dominion. In 712 it was overrun by the Arabs, who conquered the whole Peninsula, and compelled the remnant of the Gothic nation to take shelter in the mountains of Asturias. The Arabs were Mahometans; they detested the faith of the Christians, and the professed motive of their various and splendid conquests was to spread the religion of their prophet Mahommed. Their poor, but daring enemies, in the fastnesses of the Asturias, viewed with yet deeper hatred the creed of the Mussulmen. While the Arabs became enervated by luxury and prosperity, they retained in adversity their hardihood and their energy, and waged war with their conquerors, even when the attempt seemed most hopeless. They persevered till, one by one, they took from the Saracens + the provinces and the towns they had conquered, and reduced them to the single kingdom of Grenada. All their conquests were undertaken in the name of heaven, and achieved under the influence of religious zeal. The Moslems were the bitterest foes of the Christian creed. For several hundred years the Spaniards waged war with them, for the recovery of their

A.D. 412.

+ Saracen means the inhabitant of a desert. In the Arabian language sarra means a desert,

RE-ESTABLISHMENT OF THE SPANIARDS.

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country; and during that time, every idea of honour and true belief was connected inseparably with the religion they professed; and all that was hateful and disgraceful was associated with dissent from it.

"While the Saracens, or Moors, were powerful, their military hardihood saved them from contempt; but when the last of the Moorish states was conquered, and the inhabitants still professing the creed of Mahommed were left at the mercy of the victors, the martial spirit of their ancient rivalry was changed by the Spaniards into a strange mixture of hatred, fear, and contempt. The prejudice of purity of blood became the most rooted of the national feelings; and the poorest peasant grew prouder of his genuine and unpolluted Christian blood than the grandees of their pompous titles.

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By an association of ideas, extremely natural in a rude, military people, the religious abhorrence which the national animosity of the Spaniards had directed against the Moors, was extended to all who differed from their own creed. When the Inquisition was established in Castille, in the thirteenth century, the enemies of Christianity, and those of their country, were completely identified in public opinion. The inquisitors, themselves, made no distinction between the relapsed Mahommetan convert, the Jew who secretly practised

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THE INQUISITION.

the ceremonies of the law, and the Christian reformer, who, with his Bible in his hand, protested against the innovations of the church of Rome: all were bound to the same stake, and perished by the same fire. Their children, and their children's children, sunk to a degraded caste, and could never obliterate the mark of infamy set upon them. In other countries, the firm endurance of martyrdom had shed a halo round the martyr's name. It had commanded the respect even of those who could unshrinkingly condemn the sufferer to undergo it. In Spain it was otherwise. The censures of the Inquision had there the power of classing the learned and sincere Christian, who loved the gospel in its original purity, with the Moor and the Jew, who detested it; and devoted him, like them, to the execration and contempt of his country. Where, then, it has been justly asked, * is that bold spirit of enquiry, that ardent love of truth, that could induce a Castillian, possessed of a bright inheritance of honour, purchased by the blood of his ancestors, in unceasing warfare against the Saracens, to swerve from the religion for which those ancestors had bled, and sink thereby, with his whole posteriy, among the remnants of that detested sect ?"

"There was, then," said Edward, "no reforma

* See "Quarterly Review," No. 57.

THE REFORMATION.

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tion in Spain. In almost every other country truth has found its way to a few individuals.”

“ Nor was Spain," said Mr. Delville, “ without some bright characters, of whom it was not worthy. In the sixteenth century, when the Inquisition was re-organized into the most efficient scheme of persecution ever devised by man, the Lutheran doctrines were first introduced at Seville. Cardinal Ximenes, the able minister of Ferdinand and Charles V. little suspecting the consequences, declared himself the patron of biblical criticism, and had the honour of publishing the first Polyglot Bible. The study of the Scriptures in the original tongues, did not fail to raise the same doubts among the Spaniards which it had produced among the learned in other countries, and the seeds of the Reformation were sparingly lodged in the bosom of Spain. The brief, but most mournful history of the fate that befell those who embraced its doctrines, well deserves your attention, and at some other period I will inform you of it; at present I will confine myself to the influence which the Inquisition exercised over the mass of the Spanish people. The votaries of science, who, since the time of Ferdinand the Catholic, and his truly great minister, Ximenes, had yielded to none in the ardour of their pursuits, found themselves discouraged by the ignorance of their country, and the mortifying indifference with

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