The misguided Spaniards knew not what they were doing. The exile of the Moors delighted them; nothing more picturesque and romantic had occurred for some time. Lope de Vega sang about the sentencia justa by which Philip III., despreciando sus barbaros tesoros, banished to Africa las ultimas reliquias de los Moros; Velazquez painted it in a memorial picture; even the mild and tolerant Cervantes forced himself to justify it. They did not understand that they had killed their golden goose. For centuries Spain had been the centre of civilization, the seat of arts and sciences, of learning, and every form of refined enlightenment. No other country in Europe had so far approached the cultivated dominion of the Moors. The brief brilliancy of Ferdinand and Isabella, and of the empire of Charles V., could found no such enduring preëminence. The Moors were banished; for a while Christian Spain shone, like the moon, with a borrowed light; then came the eclipse, and in that darkness Spain has grovelled ever since. The true memorial of the Moors is seen in desolate tracts of utter barrenness, where once the Moslem grew luxuriant vines and olives and yellow ears of corn; in a stupid, ignorant population where once wit and learning flourished; in the general stagnation and degradation of a people which has hopelessly fallen in the scale of the nations, and has deserved its humiliation.
INDEX TO THE TEXT AND THE NOTES.
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[A], [B], [C], [D], [E], [F], [G], [H], [I], [J], [K], [L], [M], [N], [O], [P], [Q], [R], [S], [T], [V], [W], [X], [Y], [Z]