and so feeling could identify himself truly with his heroes.
Formed originally of very different races, Celts and Goths, mixed with the descendants of Romans and Phœnicians or Carthaginians, the Spaniards had against the Moors become amalgamated into one people, whose great bond of union was their religion more even than their country. This holy cause ennobled their conduct, and gave them higher aims and motives than any ordinary warfare could do; so that acting constantly under the sense of such feelings, their national character assumed the staid bearing, which has always since so favourably distinguished it. Hence also the national literature, even in its lightest productions, assumed the tone of high moral and practical tendency which it has generally borne, far removed from the comparatively trifling topics which formed the staple subjects of the literature of neighbouring countries.
There is another mistake into which some writers have fallen, in supposing that Spain owed her civilization entirely to the Moors. The Arab conquest undoubtedly entailed on her for many ages a succession of enlightened as well as warlike rulers, who are justly to be classed among the greatest patrons of literature and art; but they fostered rather than founded the sciences that afterwards flourished under their rule, and which they found preparing to burst forth in the country they conquered. Though their forefathers might have come from the seats of learning in the East, such as they then were, the immediate conquerors of Spain were natives of the neighbouring parts of Africa, where the sciences had not flourished in any remarkable degree before the conquest, and where they did not rise subsequently to any eminence. The learned Lampillas, who has given us a very able Vindication of Spanish Literature, in answer to the attacks of some Italian critics, might justly have gone further than he has done as to its merits under the Moorish domination. Rather than as owing her advances in learning and civilization to the Moors, it is more probable that these were the remains of former civilization, existing among the Roman colonies on the dissolution of the empire. At that time Spain was essentially inhabited by descendants of Romans, as it still continues to be, mainly, to the present day. Latin had become the language of the country, and the best of the later Latin authors, Seneca, Lucan, Martial, Quinctilian and others, were natives of the Peninsula. The Romans had planted sixty-seven colonies there, and in the time of Vespasian could enumerate 360 cities inhabited by them. These would undoubtedly retain their municipal institutions, and were perhaps more retentive of Roman manners than were even the towns of Italy. The original inhabitants had been driven into the mountains of Catalonia, Cantabria and Lusitania. They were of Celtic origin, and their descendants in those provinces still show that origin by a different pronunciation of the language imposed on the country by the Romans; while the Castillians, being of purer descent from them, speak even now a language little different from that in common colloquial use under the Emperors. The lower orders, in fact, speak an idiom nearer to it than do the educated classes, showing that the main race of the people, in Madrid for instance, remains essentially Roman. In Betica or Andalusia and the South of Spain, the descendants of Romans had become incorporated with those of Phœnician or Carthaginian and a few Greek colonists, forming together a race perhaps still more civilized than the new-comers. Thus the Moors found the people they had conquered in a high state of civilization, scarcely affected by former conquests, and they had only the merit of accepting and continuing the mental culture which they found there, and which they had not possessed in their native deserts.
The Goths and Vandals had swept like a hurricane over Spain; but they passed over it without leaving any considerable traces of their conquest. This is clear from the circumstance of so few Northern words remaining in the language of the country. At the entrance of the Moors into Spain, the dominant party there was certainly of Gothic descent; but they had already lost their Northern idioms, and were immerged in the mass of the people they had conquered, in the usual course of such events, as the Scandinavians soon did in Normandy and the Normans in England. When the races had begun to amalgamate in Spain, the distinctive lines might have been longer discernible in the South, if it had not been for the Moorish invasion. This soon repeated the events of former conquests, in the extermination of the fighting men and the enslaving of the other classes, who became feudatories or worse. Those who escaped to the mountains of the North constituted a nucleus of resistance, which was no doubt much strengthened in their subsequent contests by the aid of the Christian population left of necessity among the Moors, who thus became dangerous as internal enemies, though they had been tolerated at first as valuable dependents. The war that then arose in Spain, and continued for upwards of 600 years, was imbued, on the part of the Christians, with all those ingredients of religious as well as patriotic feeling that render wars remarkable for desperate conflict. On the part of the Moors, it is but justice toward them to say, that for chivalrous honour and bravery they proved themselves in no respect inferior to their opponents, who, thus engaged in generous rivalry, became distinguishable for the same virtues.
The circumstances of the wars between the Christians and the Moors were too near to the every-day experience of the people to allow of any imaginary addition to the legends of the times, and they were too engrossing in importance and interest to require any heightening. The ballads founded upon them, therefore, assumed almost the matter-of-fact air of history, and this seemed hence to become the characteristic of all the subsequent literature of Spain. It is true that romances abounded in which giants and other absurdities of knight-errantry might be found, but they were principally of foreign origin, and did not become incorporated in the national poetry. This national poetry was always true to its mission, for it may be observed that the poets of Spain have seldom or never gone beyond their own history for their heroes; they have rather instinctively followed the maxim of the great lyrist of old, not to select objects of admiration from strangers, but to seek them at home,—
Οὐδ’ ἀλλοτρίων ἔρωτες
Ἀνδρὶ Φέρειν κρέσσονες,
Οἰκόθεν μάτευε.
Thus also they were secure of the sympathy of their audience, and found patriotism the best inspirer of poetry.