[Footnote A:  The belief in the existence of the Fountain of Youth belongs to many countries and to all times.  Not to mention other instances, Herodotus, in his third book, (23,) tells of a fountain of the kind which was possessed by “the long-lived Ethiopians,” and which caused the bather’s flesh to become sleek and glossy, and sent forth an odor like that of violets.  Peter Martyr, to whom we owe so many lively pictures of the effect on the European mind of the discovery of America and its consequences, wrote to Leo X. of the marvellous fountain which was sought by Ponce de Leon, and in terms that leave no doubt that he was well inclined to place considerable faith in the truth of the common story.  The clever Pope probably believed as much of it as he did of the New Testament.  Peter Martyr does not, we think, mention the Ethiopian fountain, of which, as he was a good scholar, and that was the age of the revival of classic learning, he must have read.]

Spain, unlike most other countries, rises and falls, and apparently is never so near to degradation as when she is most strong, and never so near to power as when she is at the weakest point to which a nation can sink and still remain a nation.  All states have had both good and evil fortune, but no other great European kingdom has known the extreme and extraordinary changes that have been experienced by Spain.  France has met with heavy reverses, but she has been a great and powerful country ever since the days of Philip Augustus, whose body was turned up the other day, after a repose of more than six centuries.  Even the victories of the English Plantagenets could but temporarily check her growth; and notwithstanding the successes of Eugene and Marlborough, Louis XIV. left France a greater country than he found it.  England’s lowest point was reached during the reigns of her first four Stuart monarchs, but her weakness was exhibited only on the side of foreign politics:  it being absurd to suppose that the country which could produce Hampden and Cromwell, Strafford and Falkland, and the men who formed the Cavalier and Roundhead armies, was then in a state of decay.  At the worst, she was but depressed, and the removal of such dead weights from her as Charles I. and James II. was all that was necessary to enable her to vindicate her claim to a first-rate place in the European family.  In 1783, at the close of the American War, men said that all was over with England; but so mistaken were they, that at that very time were growing up the men who were to lead her fleets and armies with success in contests compared with which the combats of Gates and Burgoyne, of Cornwallis and Washington, were but as skirmishes.  No other nation, perhaps, ever had so sudden and so great a fall as that which France met with in 1814-15.  It was the most perfect specimen of the “grand smash” order of things that history mentions, if we consider both what was lost, and how quickly it was lost.  But it was humiliating merely, and