Lo! where the recreant spurs o’er stock and stone!—
‘Curses pursue the slave, and wrath divine!
Rivers engulf him!’—‘Hush!’ in shuddering tone
The prelate said; ‘Rash prince, yon vision’d form’s thine own.’
“Just then a torrent cross’d the flier’s course;
The dangerous ford the kingly likeness tried,
But the deep eddies whelm’d both man and horse,
Swept like benighted peasant down the tide.”
—Scott, The Vision of Don Roderic.
The young Arab power was at the door of Spain before the degenerate Goths were half awake to their danger. They had hardly shaken off their slumbers before they were prisoners or fugitives from the house they had ruled for almost exactly three centuries. Roderic and his sixty thousand men fought madly for three days at Xeres near the junction of the Guadalete and Guadalquivir, but when the brave king himself lost courage and fled—if indeed he fled—the whole race took panic with him. The end of Roderic is lost in a tangle of fable and tradition. Scott has embalmed the legend as quoted above, and Southey in his poem, The Last of the Goths, has built him a splendid mausoleum; but all that history can say is that his crown and sceptre were found on the bank of the stream and that his kingdom was as completely disembodied as its empty emblems. And now, as Hume[b] says, “The purely Gothic element in Spain was withered up as if by fire.”