Title:  Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863

Author:  Various

Release Date:  June 9, 2005 [EBook #16028]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

*** Start of this project gutenberg EBOOK Atlantic monthly, volume 12 ***

Produced by Cornell University, Joshua Hutchinson, Josephine Paolucci and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

THE

Atlantic monthly.

A Magazine of literature, art, and politics.

Vol.  XII.—­November, 1863.—­No.  LXXIII.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1863, by Ticknor and fields, in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

* * * * *

The Spaniard and the heretic.

[In the August number of the “Atlantic,” under the title of “The Fleur-de-Lis in Florida,” will be found a narrative of the Huguenot attempts to occupy that country, which, exciting the jealousy of Spain, gave rise to the crusade whose history is recorded below.]

The monk, the inquisitor, the Jesuit, these were the lords of Spain,—­sovereigns of her sovereign, for they had formed and fed the dark and narrow mind of that tyrannical recluse.  They had formed and fed the minds of her people, quenched in blood every spark of rising heresy, and given over a noble nation to bigotry, dark, blind, inexorable as the doom of fate.  Linked with pride, ambition, avarice, every passion of a rich, strong nature, potent for good and ill, it made the Spaniard of that day a scourge as dire as ever fell on man.

Day was breaking on the world.  Light, hope, freedom, pierced with vitalizing ray the clouds and the miasma that hung so thick over the prostrate Middle Age, once noble and mighty, now a foul image of decay and death.  Kindled with new life, the nations teemed with a progeny of heroes, and the stormy glories of the sixteenth century rose on awakened Europe.  But Spain was the citadel of darkness,—­a monastic cell, an inquisitorial dungeon, where no ray could pierce.  She was the bulwark of the Church, against whose adamantine front the wrath of innovation beat in vain.  In every country of Europe the party of freedom and reform was the national party, the party of reaction and absolutism was the Spanish party, leaning on Spain, looking to her for help.  Above all, it was so in France; and while within her bounds there was a semblance of peace, the national and religious rage burst forth on a wilder theatre.  Thither it is for us to follow it, where, on the shores of Florida, the Spaniard and the Frenchman, the bigot and the Huguenot, met in the grapple of death.