The Quarterly Review

6. The Bible in Spain. By George Borrow. With the notes and glossary of U. R. Burke. Fourth impression of the latest (1899) edition. London: Murray, 1907. 7. Trafalgar. By Benito Pérez Galdós. Edited, with notes and introduction, by F. A. Kirkpatrick. Cambridge University Press, 1905.

THE nineteenth century was one of supreme importance to Spain; it saw the epoch of her greatest degradation, and it has seen her rise, after sixty years of continuous struggle for light, liberty, and all that a people hold dear, to a position which is bringing her once more to her proper place among the great nations of the world. It is a country of fascinating interest, but one of the most difficult to understand. Perhaps about no other have more absurd fables or such misleading ideas obtained currency; and even at the present moment it seems impossible to break the spell of the old romances. Vol. 208.—No. 414.

Writers of to-day, in England and America, continue to repeat the old parrot cries; they appear to be wholly ignorant of the work that has been done by Spanish critical historians and archæologists. For them Prescott is still an authority on fifteenth-century Spain; Dahn has said the last word-some thirty-four years ago-on the Visigothic kingdom; Gayangos is the only historian they know of touching the Saracen occupation, though he wrote before the Revolution of 1868 had let light in through the darkened windows of his country's records, and he was not even allowed to see the Arabic MSS. in the Escorial, because he wrote in English.

It is especially in regard to the earlier times, for instance those of the Moorish invasion and conquest, on which the labours of men like Don Eduardo Saavedra have thrown so much light, that this complaint may with justice be made. But it is also true of later periods; indeed Spain, which had so much interest for the generation which had lived through the Peninsular War, and for its successor, has been unaccountably neglected by English writers during the last fifty years.

It was a curiously complex character which was manifested by the Spanish people when, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, we find them ground down under their alien rulers, with a feeble, though amiable, king completely in the hands of his contemptible wife and her paramour, Godoy; the heir to the throne at one moment conspiring against his father, at another grovelling in a feigned repentance and betraying his fellow conspirators, to shield himself, more base and false than it is possible to conceive, and yet the idol of the people, who credited him with every virtue because they saw in him a saviour from the disgrace which overhung the court. The state of ignorance was appalling. For four centuries Spain had been ground under the iron heel of the Inquisition, every impulse to enlightenment trodden under foot, and the grossest superstition not only encouraged but actually enforced under cruel conditions. Such was the

country which Charles IV left when he and his ignoble son, in whose favour he had abdicated, became prisoners to Napoleon, and the nation rose, in spite of its treacherous rulers, in defence of country and liberty.

Broadly speaking, the first sixty-eight years of the

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The Quarterly Review, Volume 208