the first Spaniard named Emperor, and the only one whose ashes were allowed to rest within the city walls; but the Spanish freedman of Augustus, Gaius Julius Hyginus, had been made the chief keeper of the Palatine Library, and Ballus, another Spaniard, had reached the consulship, and had been accorded the honour of a public triumph.  Hadrian, again, was a Spaniard, and Marcus Aurelius a son of Cordoba.  No wonder that Spain is proud to remember that, of the “eighty perfect golden years” which Gibbon declares to have been the happiest epoch in mankind’s history, no less than sixty were passed beneath the sceptre of her Caesars.

The conquered had become conquerors; the intermarriage of Roman soldiers and settlers with Spanish women modified the original race; the Iberians invaded the politics and the literature of their conquerors.  St. Augustine mourned the odiosa cantio of Spanish children learning Latin, but the language of Rome itself was altered by its Iberian emperors and literati; the races, in fact, amalgamated, and the Spaniard of to-day, to those who know him well, bears a strange resemblance to the Roman citizens with whom the letters of the Younger Pliny so charmingly make us familiar.  The dismemberment of the Roman Empire left Spain exposed to the inroads of the Northern barbarians, and led indirectly to the subsequent Moorish inrush; for the Jews, harassed by a severe penal code, hailed the Arabs as a kindred race; and with their slaves made common cause with the conquering hordes.

The Goths seem to have been little more than armed settlers in the country.  Marriage between them and the Iberians was forbidden by their laws, and the traces of their occupation are singularly few:  not a single inscription or book of Gothic origin remains, and it seems doubtful if any trace of the language can be found in Castilian or any of its dialects.  It is strange, if this be true, that there should be so strong a belief in the influence of Gothic blood in the race.

In all these wars and rumours of war the men of the hardy North remained practically unconquered.  The last to submit to the Roman, the first to throw off the yoke of the Moor, the Basques and Asturians appear to be the representatives of the old inhabitants of Spain, who never settled down under the sway of the invader or acquiesced in foreign rule.  Cicero mentions a Spanish tongue which was unintelligible to the Romans; was this Basque, which is equally so now to the rest of Spain, and which, if you believe the modern Castilian, the devil himself has never been able to master?