Chained to the chimney corner by the unsatisfactory state of his health, the Baron devoted himself to study and literary occupation, pored over Froissart, acquired the old French, and revelled in the gallant pages of Queen Margaret of Navarre. At Pau, indeed, his third Pyrenean expedition concludes, but not so his book, for which he finds abundant materials in the reminiscences of his two previous journeys. His account of the Basques is especially interesting, containing much that could only have been gleaned by long residence in the country, and great familiarity with the usages of that singular people. Few in number, these dwellers amongst the western Pyrenees are formidable by their courage and energy; and from the remotest periods of their history, have made themselves respected and even feared. Hannibal treated them with consideration, and was known to alter his proposed line of march to avoid the fierce attacks of this handful of mountaineers. The Roman proconsuls sought their alliance. Cæsar, against whom, and under Pompey's banners, they arrayed themselves, was unable to subdue them. After the fall of Rome, the men of the Pyrenees were attacked in turn by Vandals, Goths, and Franks; their houses were destroyed, their lands laid waste, but they themselves, unattainable in their mountains, continued free. A deluge of barbarians overflowed Gaul and Spain; conquerors and conquered amalgamated, and divided the territory amongst them; still the Pyreneans continued unmixed in race, and undisturbed in their fastnesses. The vanquished Goth retreated before the warlike and encroaching Saracen, and the crescent standard fluttered amongst the mountains of northern Spain. It found no firm footing, and soon its bearers retraced their bloody path, strewing it with the bones of their best and bravest, and pursued by the victorious warriors of Charles Martel. But of all the historical fights that have taken place in the Pyrenees, there is not one whose tradition has been so well preserved as the great defeat of Charlemagne. The fame of Roland still resounds in popular melody, and echoes amongst the wild ravines and perilous passes, whose names, in numerous instances, connect them with his exploits.
The Basques are brave, intelligent, and proud,—simple but high-minded. They have ever shown a strong repugnance to foreign influence and habits; and have clung to old customs and to their singular language. It is curious to behold half a million of men—whose narrow territory is formed of a corner of France and another of Spain, closely hemmed in, and daily traversed, by hosts of Frenchmen and Spaniards—preserving a language which, from its difficulty and want of resemblance to any other known tongue, very few foreigners ever acquire. They have their own musical instruments—not the most harmonious in the world; their own music, of peculiar originality and wildness; their own dances and games, dress and national colours, all more or less different from those of the rest of Spain. There is no doubt of their being first-rate fighting men, but the habit of contending with superior numbers has given them peculiar notions on the subject of military success and glory. They attach no shame to a retreat or even to a flight; but those antagonists who suppose that because they run away they are beaten, sooner or later find themselves egregiously mistaken. Flight is a part of their tactics; to fatigue the enemy, and inflict heavy loss at little to themselves, is upon all occasions their aim. They care nothing for the empty honour of sleeping on the bloody battle-field over which they have all day fought. They could hardly be made to understand the merit of such a proceeding; they take much greater credit when they thin the enemy's ranks without suffering themselves. And if they often run away, they are ever ready to return to the fray. They are born with a natural aptitude for the only species of fighting for which their mountainous land is adapted. We have been greatly amused and interested, when rambling in their country, by watching a favourite game frequently played upon Sundays and other holidays. The boys of two villages meet at an appointed spot and engage in a regular skirmish; turf and clods of earth, often stones, being substituted for bullets. The spirit and skill with which the lads carry on the mock-encounter, the wild yells called forth by each fluctuation of the fight, the fierceness of their juvenile faces, when, after a well-directed volley, one side rushes forward to the charge, armed with the thick bamboo-like stems of the Indian corn, their white teeth firmly set, and a barbarous Basque oath upon their lips, strongly recall the more earnest and bloody encounters in which their fathers have so often distinguished themselves. These contests, which sometimes become rather serious from the passionate character of the Basques, and often terminate in a few broken heads, are encouraged by the elder people, and compose the sole military education of a race, who do not fight the worse because they are unacquainted with the drill-sergeant, and with the very rudiments of scientific warfare. The tenacity with which these mountaineers adhere to the usages of their ancestors, even when they are unfitted to the century, and disadvantageous to themselves, is very remarkable. The Basque is said to be so stubborn, that he knocks a nail into the wall with his head; but the Arragonese is said to surpass the Basque, inasmuch as he puts the head of the nail against the wall, and tries to drive it in by striking his skull against the point. When, in the ninth century, the French Kings conquered for a short time a part of the Basque provinces, they prudently abstained from interference with the privileges and customs of the inhabitants, and when the whole of Spain was finally united into one kingdom under Ferdinand the Catholic, the Basques retained their republican forms. Every Basque is more or less noble. The genealogical pride, proverbially attributed to Spaniards, is out-heroded by that of these mountaineers, amongst whom a charcoal-burner or a muleteer will hold himself as good and ancient a gentleman as the best duke in the land. "In the valley of the Bastan," says the Baron, "all the peasants' houses are decorated with coats of arms, hewn in stone, and generally placed over the house door; the owner of the smallest cottage is rarely without a parchment patent of nobility. A peasant of that valley once told me his family dated from the time of Queen Maricastana. El tiempo de la reyna Maricastana, is a proverb implying, 'from time immemorial.'" Certainly there is no country where such equality exists amongst all classes; an equality, however, rather pleasing than disagreeable in its results. The demeanour of the less fortunate of the people towards those whom wealth and education place above them, is as remote from insolence and brutality, as it is from cringing servility. The poorest peasant, tilling his patch of maize, answers the question of the rich proprietor, who drives his carriage past his cottage, with the same frank courtesy and manly assurance, with which he would acknowledge the greeting or interrogatory of a fellow-labourer.
Baron Vaerst indulges in some curious speculations as to the origin of this flourishing and unmixed race of mountaineers. "Some say they are an aboriginal tribe, and that their language was spoken by Adam(!); others set them down as an old Phœnician colony, whilst others again vaguely guess them to be the descendants of a wandering horde from the north or east. The language is like no other, and those who speak it know nothing of its history. Except before God, these people have never bent the knee in homage, and have never paid taxes, but only a voluntary tribute, collected amongst themselves.
"Proud of the independence they have so well defended, they for the most part, in order to preserve their nationality, have married amongst themselves. The Basque tongue has one thing in common with those of Spaniard Gascony, namely, the indiscriminate use of the B. and the V. They say indifferently Biscaya or Viscaya, Balmaseda or Valmaseda. The story is a well-known one, of the Spaniard who maintained French to be a miserable language, because in speaking it no distinction was made between a widow and an ox,—veuve and bœuf receiving from him pretty nearly the same pronunciation. I have still a letter from the well-known Echeverria, addressed to me as Baron Baerst. Scaliger, when speaking of the Gascons and of their custom of confounding the v and b, says; felicitas populi quibus bibere est vivere." Many troubadours have written and sung in the Gascon dialect; the memory of one of the most ancient of them is preserved in popular legends on account of his tragical fate. Beloved by an illustrious lady, the wife of Baron Castel Roussillon, he was enticed into an ambuscade and murdered by the jealous husband, who then tore out his heart, and had it dressed for the Countess's dinner. The meal concluded, he produced the severed head of her lover, told her what she had eaten, and inquired if the flavour was good. "Si bon et si savoureux," she replied, "que jamais autre manger ne m'en ôtera le gout." And she threw herself headlong from her balcony. The nobles of the land, the King of Arragon at their head, held the conduct of the husband so unworthy that they threw him into prison, confiscated his estates, and united in one grave the mortal remains of the unfortunate lovers.
Whilst the Basques and Bearnese enjoyed a long series of tranquil and happy years, Roussillon was a prey to bloody wars and to the ravages of ruthless conquerors. Goths and Saracens, Normans, Arragonese, and French, fought for centuries about its possession. This state of perpetual warfare naturally had great influence on the character of the people, who continued wild and savage much longer than their neighbours. The passes of the Pyrenees were a constant motive for fresh hostilities, and pretext for lawless aggression. The rich committed every sort of crime, without being made personally answerable. One of the old laws of Roussillon, significant of the state of the country, fixes the rate of payment at which crimes might be committed. Five sous were the fine for inflicting a wound; if a bone was broken, it was ten times as dear; a box on the ear cost five sous, the tearing out of an eye a hundred; a common murder three hundred sous, that of a monk four hundred, and of a priest nine hundred. Other luxuries in proportion. From which curious statement, a priest in those days appears to have been worth three laymen, and a gouged eye to have been estimated at twice the value of a broken bone. Flesh-wounds and punches on the head were decidedly cheap and within the reach of persons of very moderate means. For the delightful state of comfort and prosperity, indicated by this tariff of mutilation and manslaughter, the men of Roussillon had to thank their last Count, who, in the year 1173, bequeathed his dominions to Alphonso II. of Arragon. Thence eternal strife with the French, who did not choose to see the key to their country in the hands of a Spanish prince; and Roussillon, the bone of contention, was also the battle ground. Nearly five centuries elapsed before the treaty of the Pyrenees put an end to these dissensions.
The sea, the Ebro, and the Pyrenees, form the natural boundaries and bulwarks of the Spanish Basque provinces. Favoured by these defences, the three provinces were the natural and safe refuge of the Iberians, when hunted by various conquerors from the plains of southern and middle Spain. Of Navarre, only the mountainous portion afforded similar safety; the levels, and especially the rich banks of the Ebro, were occupied by the victors. Biscay, Alava, and Guipuzcoa were never under the dominion of the Moors, who obtained quiet possession of Navarre as far as Pampeluna, but only held it about twelve years. Each of the three provinces has its own constitution and rights, peculiar to itself, some of the privileges and laws being of a very original character. In Alava, the general procurator, or chief of the provincial government, swears every year upon an old knife—the Machete Vitoriano—to uphold the privileges of the province. "I desire," he says, "that my throat may be cut with this knife if I fail to maintain and defend the fueros of the land." The Biscayan coasts breed excellent sailors; as already mentioned, they were the first to undertake the distant fisheries of the whale and cod. They are probably better calculated for enterprising merchant-seamen than for men-of-war's men, the inveterate independence and stiff-neckedness of the race being obnoxious to regular military discipline. "Quisiera mucho mas ser leonero que tener carga de Biscaynos,"[6] was a saying of Gonsalvo de Cordova. The naval squadrons of Biscay, however, are to be read of in history. It seems strange enough to Englishmen, to whom these petty provinces are known but as obscure nooks of the Peninsula, to read in Baron Vaerst's pages that "the fleet of Guipuzcoa, united with that of Biscay, completely annihilated, in a bloody naval action, fought on the 29th August 1350, the English fleet of King Edward the Third, and thereby procured Spain an advantageous treaty of commerce with England." There is small probability, we presume, of Lord Auckland's sending half-a-dozen frigates to revenge this old insult by fetching the present Spanish fleet into an English port, and there retaining them until the wise men of Madrid reduce their suicidal duties on foreign manufactures. We have stated our firm conviction that England would gain little by such reduction. Little, that is to say, in the way in which Messieurs Louis-Philippe and Guizot and their organs are pleased to assume that she expects to be benefited. "England," says a writer, already quoted, "has never asked any thing for which she did not offer a generous reciprocity. If the Spanish government, blind to its true interests, has constantly refused, in consequence of chimerical fears and false views, to renounce a prohibitive system, rendered illusory by smuggling, itself alone has suffered. For England it is a mere question of morality. The contraband trade compensates her for the ignorance of Spanish rulers.... But the government of a commercial country must grieve to see commercial transactions resting on the basis of smuggling—on a violation of law and of public morality. England, where every thing reposes on credit and good faith, submits with strong repugnance to stipulations so organised that smuggling is the rule, and legal traffic the exception."[7]
JUDAISM IN THE LEGISLATURE.
It has been frequently observed, that the chief events of the English history, during the last three centuries, have turned on religion.