“Gabriel,” interrupted the priest, “you are talking absurdities.  The true Spain began with the emperor, and went on equally gloriously under Don Philip II.  This is the pure and uncorrupted Spain that we ought to take as an example, and which we hope to restore.”

“No.  The pure and uncorrupted Spain, the Spanish Spain without foreign admixture, is that of the Arabs, Moors and Jews, that of religious tolerance, that of industrial and agricultural wealth, and of free municipalities; that which perished under the Catholic kings.  What came after was a Teutonic and a Flemish Spain turned into a German colony, serving as a mercenary under foreign standards, ruining itself in undertakings in which it had no interest, shedding blood and gold for the ambition of the so-called Holy Roman Empire.  I can understand the enchantment that the emperor exercised over the bigoted and ignorant people who worshipped the past.  A great man that Don Carlos!  Brave in fight, astute in politics, jolly and hearty as one of the burgomasters of his own country; a great eater, a great drinker, and loving to catch the girls round the waist.  But he had nothing Spanish about him.  He only appreciated his mother’s heritage for what he could wring out of it.  Spain became a servant to Germany, ready to supply as many men as were required, and to furnish loans and taxes.  All the exuberant life garnered in this country by Hispano-Arab culture was absorbed by the north in less than a hundred years.  The free municipalities disappeared, their defenders went to the scaffold both in Castille and Valencia; the Spaniard abandoned his plough or his weaving to range the world with an arquebus on his shoulder, and the town militias were transformed into bands which fought all over Europe without knowing why.  The flourishing towns became villages; churches were turned into convents; the popular and tolerant clergy were changed into friars who imitated with servile complacency the German fanaticism.  The fields remained barren for want of hands to cultivate them, the poor dreamt of becoming rich from the sack of the enemy’s towns and left their work; the industrious burghers abandoned commerce as only fit for heretics, and became nurseries of clerks and petty magistrates; and the armies of Spain as unbeaten and glorious as they were ragged, with no pay but pillage and in continual mutiny against their chiefs, flooded our country with a swarm of wretched vagabonds, from whence proceeded the bully, the beggar with his blunderbuss, the highwayman, the wandering hermits, the starving nobleman, and all those characters of which picturesque novels have availed themselves.”

“But, the devil, Gabriel!” cried indignantly Silver Stick; “do you deny that Don Carlos, who built the Alcazar of Toledo, and Don Philip II., who lived in this very cloister, were two great kings?”