As to Spain, it is a nerveless country.  It does not possess the use, it only suffers the abuse, of a nobility.  For some time, and even before the settlement of the Bourbon dynasty, that body has been systematically lowered, and rendered incapable by exclusion, and for incapacity excluded from affairs.  In this circle the body is in a manner annihilated; and so little means have they of any weighty exertion either to control or to support the crown, that, if they at all interfere, it is only by abetting desperate and mobbish insurrections, like that at Madrid, which drove Squillace from his place.  Florida Blanca is a creature of office, and has little connection and no sympathy with that body.

As to the clergy, they are the only thing in Spain that looks like an independent order; and they are kept in some respect by the Inquisition, the sole, but unhappy resource of public tranquillity and order now remaining in Spain.  As in Venice, it is become mostly an engine of state,—­which, indeed, to a degree, it has always been in Spain.  It wars no longer with Jews and heretics:  it has no such war to carry on.  Its great object is, to keep atheistic and republican doctrines from making their way in that kingdom.  No French book upon any subject can enter there which does not contain such matter.  In Spain, the clergy are of moment from their influence, but at the same time with the envy and jealousy that attend great riches and power.  Though the crown has by management with the Pope got a very great share of the ecclesiastical revenues into its own hands, much still remains to them.  There will always be about that court those who look out to a farther division of the Church property as a resource, and to be obtained by shorter methods than those of negotiations with the clergy and their chief.  But at present I think it likely that they will stop, lest the business should be taken out of their hands,—­and lest that body, in which remains the only life that exists in Spain, and is not a fever, may with their property lose all the influence necessary to preserve the monarchy, or, being poor and desperate, may employ whatever influence remains to them as active agents in its destruction.

[Sidenote:  Castile different from Catalonia and Aragon.]

The Castilians have still remaining a good deal of their old character, their gravedad, lealtad, and el temor de Dios; but that character neither is, nor ever was, exactly true, except of the Castilians only.  The several kingdoms which compose Spain have, perhaps, some features which run through the whole; but they are in many particulars as different as nations who go by different names:  the Catalans, for instance, and the Aragonians too, in a great measure, have the spirit of the Miquelets, and much more of republicanism than of an attachment to royalty.  They are more in the way of trade and intercourse with France, and, upon the least internal movement, will disclose and probably let loose a spirit that may throw the whole Spanish monarchy into convulsions.