[1] From the Latin word solum, ground.
[2] "C'est un pois qui a l'ambition d'être un haricot et qui réussit trop bien." THÉOPHILE GAUTIER "Voyage en Espagne."
[3] "Las inteligencias más humildas comprenden las ideas más elevadas; y los que economizan la verdad y la publican sólo cuando están seguros de ser comprendidos viven en grandisimo error, porque la verdad, aunque no sea comprendida, ejerce misteriosas influencias y conduce por cáminos ocultos a las sublimidades más puras, alas que brotan incomprensibles y espontáneas de las almas vulgares."
Angel Ganivet: "Idearium Español."
[4] When the Duke of Osuna, the Spanish Ambassador to England in Elizabeth's reign, dropped some pearls of price from his embroidered cloak, he disdained to pick them up. A nobler form of Castilian haughtiness was that of the Marqués de Villena who, refusing to live in his palace after a traitor (the Constable de Bourbon) had been lodged there, set fire to it. There is something that appeals to the imagination in many of the privileges of Spanish nobles. Thus the Marqués de Astorga to-day, is hereditary canon in León Cathedral, because one of the Osorios fought in the battle of Clavijo, in 846.
[5] The blood of the Cid flows to-day in the veins of Alfonso XIII through his descent both from the French Bourbons and from Spain's earlier royal house. A daughter of the Campeador married an infante of Navarre, whose granddaughter married Sancho III of Castile. The son of this king was the good and great Alfonso VIII él de las Navas, who, married to Eleanor of England (they both lie buried in Las Huelgas), was grandfather alike of St. Ferdinand III of Castile and St. Louis IX of France.
[6] Translated by Ormsby.
[7] "Ancient Spanish Ballads," translated by Lockhart.
[8] Llorente, a bitter assailant of the Inquisition, gives the number of victims as 31,900. Llorente was traitor to his country during the invasion of the French and fled ignominiously on their defeat, pensioned during his later years by the freemasons of Paris; he falsified Basque history to win the corrupt Godoy's favour (von Ranke's statement); an ex-priest he assisted in church robbery. Would Benedict Arnold be accepted as an authority on the American Revolution? The Encyclopedia Brittanica, even in its ninth edition, has in its sketch on Spain, the following curious assertion—"bigotry and fanaticism which led to the destruction of hundreds of thousands of victims at the hands of the Inquisition." Even the political victims in the Netherlands under the inexorable Alba, who did to death some 18,000 people, cannot swell the number to a fraction of this statement. And if the Netherlands' victims are to be laid to the door of religious persecution, then must the massacres in Ireland of the inexorable Cromwell come under the same heading: as an Englishman judges Cromwell apart from his crimes, so a Spaniard sees more in Alva than his felonies. History presented to us in parallel columns would do much toward giving us fairer views.
[9] Described by an eyewitness, the brave gentlewoman, Mrs. Willoughby. See: "English Martyrs," Vol. I and II of the C. T. S. Publications: 22 Paternoster Row: London. Dr. Thomas Addis Emmet in "Ireland under English Rule" (Putnam's Sons, N. Y. 1903) gives occurrences equally terrible.