and armies by their abilities and exploits revived recollections of what had been done by Parma and his hosts.  Spinola, who was scarcely inferior to Farnese, conquered the Palatinate, and so began the Thirty Years’ War favorably to the Catholic cause.  The great victory of Nordlingen, won by the Catholics in 1635, was due to the valor of the Spanish troops in the Imperial army.  Spain appeared to be as powerful as at any former period, and the revival of her ascendency might have been expected by those who judged only from external indications of strength.  Yet a few years, however, and it was clear to all politicians at least that Spain was far gone into a decline, and that the course of Olivarez had been fatal to her greatness; and the mass of mankind, who judge only from glaring actions, could not fail to appreciate the nature of such events as the defeat of Rocroi and the loss of Portugal, the latter including the loss of all the dependencies of the Portuguese in Africa, America, and India.  No historical transaction of the seventeenth century testifies so strongly to the weakness of a first-class power as the Revolution of Portugal.  Though Portugal lay at the very door of Spain, that country slipped from her feeble hands, and she never could recover it.  Having resumed her encroaching, domineering course before she had fairly recovered her strength, she broke down in less than a quarter of a century, though even then the full extent of her weakness was not generally understood.  It is an amusement to read works that were written in the reigns of Philip IV. and Charles II., in which Spain is spoken of as a great power, and to compare the words of their writers with the actual facts of the case.  If we were to fix upon any one date as indicating the final breaking down of Austrian Spain, it would be the year 1659, when the treaty of the Pyrenees was made, and when the old rival of France became virtually her vassal.  From that time we must date the beginning of that strange interference in Spanish affairs which has formed so much of the public business of France, whereby one of the proudest of peoples have become, as it were, provincials to one of the vainest of peoples.  It is true that there were more wars between Austrian Spain and France, but they served only to show that the former had lost the power to contend with her rival, who might look forward to the day when the empire of Philip II. should fall to pieces, and furnish spoil to those strong nations that watch over the beds of sick men in purple.

The state of decay in which the first Bourbon king of Spain found his inheritance, in 1701, is well known.  The War of the Succession soon followed, and Spain was shorn of some of her most magnificent foreign possessions.  All that she had held in Flanders was lost,—­and so were Naples, and Sicily, and Sardinia, and the Milanese, and other lands that had been ruled, and wellnigh ruined, by the Austro-Burgundian kings.  The English had Gibraltar, and were holding