has been the susceptibility of the Spanish mind in regard to the pollution of its soil by heretic corpses that even Charles I. of England, when he came a-wooing to Spain, could hardly gain permission to bury his page by night in the garden of the embassy; and in later days the Prussian Minister was compelled to smuggle his dead child out of the kingdom among his luggage to give it Christian burial. Even since the days of September the clergy has fought manfully against giving sepulture to Protestants; but Rivero, alcalde of Madrid and president of the Cortes, was not inclined to waste time in dialectics, and sent a police force to protect the heretic funerals and to arrest any priest who disturbed them. There is freedom of speech and printing. The humorous journals are full of blasphemous caricatures that would be impossible out of a Catholic country, for superstition and blasphemy always run in couples. It was the Duke de Guise, commanding the pope's army at Civitella, who cried in his rage at a rain which favored Alva, "God has turned Spaniard;" like Quashee, who burns his fetish when the weather is foul. The liberal Spanish papers overflowed with wit at the proclamation of infallibility. They announced that
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his holiness was now going into the lottery business with brilliant prospects of success; that he could now tell what Father Manterola had done with the thirty thousand dollars' worth of bulls he sold last year and punctually neglects to account for, and other levities of the sort, which seemed greatly relished, and which would have burned the facetious author two centuries before, and fined and imprisoned him before the fight at Alcolea. The minister having charge of the public instruction has promised to present a law for the prohibition of dogmatic doctrine in the national schools. The law of civil registry and civil marriage, after a desperate struggle in the Cortes, has gone into operation with general assent. There is a large party which actively favors the entire separation of the spiritual from the temporal power, making religion voluntary, and free, and breaking its long concubinage with the crown. The old superstition, it is true, still hangs like a malarial fog over Spain. But it is invaded by flashes and rays of progress. It cannot resist much longer the sunshine of this tolerant age.
Far up the mountain-side, in the shade of a cluster of chestnuts, is a rude block of stone, called
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the "King's Chair," where Philip used to sit in silent revery, watching as from an eyry the progress of the enormous work below. If you go there, you will see the same scene upon which his basilisk glance reposed,--in a changed world, the .same unchanging scene,--the stricken waste, the shaggy horror of the mountains, the fixed plain wrinkled like a frozen sea, and in the centre of the perfect picture the vast chill bulk of that granite pile, rising cold, colorless, and stupendous, as if carved from an iceberg by the hand of Northern gnomes. It is the palace of vanished royalty, the temple of a religion which is dead. There are kings and priests still, and will be for many coming years. But never again can a power exist which shall rear to the glory of the sceptre and the cowl a monument like this. It is a page of history deserving to be well pondered, for it never will be repeated. The world which Philip ruled from the foot of the Guadarrama has passed away. A new heaven and a new earth came in with the thunders of 1776 and 1789. There will be no more Pyramids, no more Versailles, no more Escoriáis. The unpublished fiat has gone forth that man is worth more than the glory of princes. The better religion of the future
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