rights at the discretion of her monarchs. But the heirs of the Spanish crown would have cursed the narrow views of their ancestors had they been sufficiently enlightened to trace up to that measure the rapid decay of their once noble inheritance. The aspiring and bold genius which had directed Spain during her political growth was deprived of its wings in the act of springing up after mental improvement. From that time it pined and sickened. Even the laurels it had gained in the field, the crown of valour which none had ever plucked from its brows, began to fade away. When Spain had become the champion of bigotry and ignorance, heaven, in mercy, palsied her sword-hand: her courage, strained to the last, and desperately exerted in a bad cause, degenerated into fierceness; and she retired from the contest covered alike with her enemies' blood and with shame. Thus degraded and exhausted, she became the inheritance of Charles II., the last of her Austrian monarchs, a feeble prince, who, having lost all hope of an heir of his body, allowed the agents of the families which claimed the succession to divide the Spaniards by their intrigues, and debauch the remnants of national honour by corruption and bribery.

The accession of Philip D'Anjou, it must be confessed, raised Spain somewhat above the state into which she had sunk under the Austrian kings. The taste and splendour of the court of Lewis XIV.was not without its influence on Spanish literature. Something was done to dispel the thick mist which had settled upon the minds of the natives; and the Inquisition itself, though preserved in the fulness of its appalling powers, as a reward for services done during the War of Succession, was alarmed to find that the king declined an invitation to an Auto da Fé, which had been prepared at Madrid to welcome his arrival.

It was on the accession of the House of Bourbon to the throne of Spain that the elements of such opinions and views as characterize the liberals of the present day were first introduced into that country. Few, if any, traces either of the classical learning or of the Italian taste which existed among the Spaniards in the reigns of Charles V. and Philip II. could be found among the degraded subjects of the last Austrian monarch. Even the beautiful language which had luxuriated in the national drama under Philip IV. was now defaced by the absurd and perverted taste of the few who employed it in writing, and the many who gained the applause of an ignorant public by the ludicrous extravagance of their ser

mons.

Under the patronage of a truly enlightened sovereign, Spain, awakening from her torpor, might have created a literature of her own, and stamped it with the character of her vigorous genius. But Philip was a bigot of the French school; he loved literature

as an ornament which became a court, and wished, if possible, to make Madrid a miniature of Paris. The few men of talent who still preserved a taste for real knowledge, and deplored the obstacles which stood in the way of national improvement, were embodied in two academies, one for the cultivation of the Spanish language; the other for the advancement of national history. Facilities were offered for a literary intercourse between the eminent men of letters in France, and these eager votaries of learning. But still that national enemy of mental improvement, the Inquisition, was supported by the king, who mindful, to the last, of the advice which Lewis XIV. had given him, resisted the repeated endeavours of his ministers to suppress, or reform it. The Inquisition, in fact, raged with uncommon fury during the forty-six years that Philip held the crown. The descendants of the baptized Jews were found to have been secretly attached to the religion of their fathers, which, by the gradual spread of the families, had multiplied to a surprising degree the secret followers of Moses. The number of general Autos da Fé during the reign of Philip V. amounted to seven hundred and eighty-two. The reports of fifty-four of these Autos, consulted by Llorente, give the following number of sufferers. Seventy-nine persons committed to the flames; sixty-three - burnt in effigy; eight hundred and twenty-nine punished by fine, imprisonment and infamy. The same historian makes the average of persons burnt alive, every year, during that period, about twenty-four. This horrid persecution fell almost exclusively upon Jews and enthusiasts. The race of protestants was utterly extinct.

While the blood-hounds of Rome were in pursuit of this smaller game, the sceptical notions which had sprung up together with the philosophical taste of the court of Lewis XV. penetrated into Spain with French literature, and became as inseparable from the knowledge acquired out of the Spanish universities, as it was from that which was called philosophy at Paris. This event was inevitable. The almost lifeless trunk of Spanish literature had been engrafted with a shoot from beyond the Pyrenees, which was now fast draining whatever sap remained in the withered roots. The works which appeared in the reign of Ferdinand VI. were written in a style that could not conceal their source. It was quite different from the Italianized prose of the sixteenth century, and partook greatly of the abrupt and pointed phraseology of the neighbouring nation. The establishment of the Spanish academy could only preserve the words of the language in a dictionary; but could not prevent an absolute change in the style. The works of Feyjoo, the man who had the greatest influence in the amelioration, as far as it went, of the popular mind, might be translated almost word for word into pure French, the language through which he had

acquired

acquired the information, he so ably adapted to the state of his country. He ventured to recommend the study of French in preference to the slight knowledge of Latin, which is still common in Spain; and though this was, at first, considered as one of his most startling paradoxes, the advice was not without effect.

The reign of Ferdinand VI. and the early part of that of his brother and successor Charles III. comprise the golden age of the Spanish liberal school. Philip V., their father, had looked upon the Inquisition as one of the main supports of his disputed right to the crown. Ferdinand and Charles began to regard it with jealousy, by reason of the frequent encroachments on the civil authority, which that tribunal was continually attempting. Charles, especially, who, during his reign at Naples, had been too near the Holy See not to fear its ambition, was a decided reformer in points unconnected with faith, and merely dependent on canon law. In order to settle a concordat with the Pope, and limit his authority in the temporal affairs of the church of Spain, Charles surrounded himself with the enlightened men who had improved their talents at the court of his predecessors. The Marquis of Roda, the Counts of Aranda, Floridablanca, and Campomanes, the Archbishops of Burgos and Zaragoza, the Bishops of Taragona, Albarracin, and Orihuela, the first four well known pupils of the Parisian school; the last five, either Jansenists, or (as we strongly suspect of all Spaniards who are described by that name) disguised followers of the same principles, were the king's assistants in the work of expelling the Jesuits from Spain, and establishing a system of ecclesiastical government upon the basis of the Gallican church.

It has been wittily observed, that whoever wishes to form a good library should choose his books exclusively out of the Prohibitory Catalogue; and it seems as if Charles III. had, by the same analogy, picked all his ministers from the Black Book of the Inquisition. The danger, however, of this secret enrolment was now greatly diminished, both from the characters of the reigning monarch and his predecessor, and the peculiar nature of the philosophical or sceptical tenets. Had philosophy obliged her followers to a conscientious avowal of their opinions, neither Ferdinand nor Charles was enlightened enough to save them; indeed, four persons were burnt during these two reigns, and fifty-six condemned to the usual correctional punishments. But the inquisitors, though eager in the pursuit of philosophical infidels, were extremely surprised and provoked when, in the new heresy, they found a kind of optical delusion-a -a huge monster in view when unpursued, and a mere shadow when approached. The hands of the holy judges seemed now to have obtained the fatal gift of Midas:-let them but touch a pupil of Voltaire or Rousseau, and the offensive mass of

heterodoxy

heterodoxy was suddenly converted into the standard gold of the purest Roman Catholic faith. Such unreal, vanishing enemies were not made to strengthen the orthodoxy of the Spaniards, by affording exhibitions at the stake. Their cautiousness and circumspection was extreme; and, though a taste for studies which were neglected at the universities, a certain generalizing and analytical tone of reasoning was soon construed by the inquisitors and their friends into a strong indication of philosophism, we know but one instance, in which the new sect presented an opportunity to inflict punishment by the mark of infamy; and none where the life of the accused was in danger.*

The accession of Charles IV. seemed most favourable to the propagation of the French taste and principles. His unconquerable aversion to the cares of government, his passionate fondness for the chase, which employed his whole existence, and the unprincipled dissipation of his wife, into whose hands the whole power of the crown had devolved, promised but little encouragement to the bigots. But they were still too strong in the prejudices and inherited feelings of the nation. The liberal ministers of Charles III. had continued in place under his son; and Floridablanca, now raised to the rank of premier, was not unwilling to support some cautious attempts at a change in the public opinion, which, without shaking the foundations, should diminish the exorbitant influence of the church. The first periodical work in Spanish had been published in the reign of Philip V.; it seems, with little success. It was entitled Diario de los Literatos, and confined, accordingly, to literary subjects. One of a more popular nature, El Censor, was now established with a view to attack popular prejudices with the weapons of

* Don Pablo de Olavide, a knight of the Order of Saint James, one of the most enlightened Spaniards of our days, was made civil governor of Andalusia in 1767. During his administration, he conceived and executed the plan of establishing colonies of Germans in the portion of Sierra Morena which separates Andalusia from La Mancha, on the road to Madrid. By his activity the bands of robbers which infested the mounpains were destroyed, several towns built, and the colonists settled under the most liberal arrangements of temporal exemption from taxes, grants of land, and a gratuitous supply of agricultural stock. Olavide was imprudent enough to have some theological disputes with a German friar, who had the spiritual charge of the colonies, and to disclose his opinions to a favourite niece, who betrayed him on her death bed. The evidence against him was too clear to be evaded by the usual professions of Catholic faith. In 1778, after two years imprisonment, he was exhibited in a private auto da fé wearing the coat of infamy. The principal inhabitants of the town were invited, to see their former governor in that degraded condition. The power and inveteracy of the prejudices, which associate every thing base and odious with the idea of heresy, were strongly exhibited in Olavide. The unprejudiced philosopher had endured the whole act of degradation with perfect composure. But, when the abstract of the trial and sentence was read and the secretary came to the charge of heresy, of which the judges had declared him strongly suspected, he exclaimed in a loud voice, God forbid!' and burst into a flood of tears.

raillery

raillery and wit. The odds of such an attack were fearful. The assailants were soon obliged to desist; not, however, without a long confinement in the Inquisition. In spite of this obstinate resistance, the bats and owls of the Spanish church saw with alarm some feeble rays of light which, through the crevices of that massive, but old structure, began to make its darkness visible. The universities had undergone a reform, which, without substituting a good and efficient system of instruction, had, nevertheless, abolished that scholastic course of education, which, by utterly perverting the intellect, made it incapable of all future improvement. Indeed, the bias of the minister's mind had been stronger than his fears; and professorships for explaining the work of Heineccius, De Jure Naturali et Gentium, curtailed of a few passages in a Spanish edition, were established at all the seats of learning. Young men of natural abilities, either from accidental hints, or by reading French books handed about among sets of trusty friends, who, for the love of knowledge, submitted to the daily fears of a call from the Inquisition, became their own instructors, and looked with contempt on the dull teachers appointed by authority.

By these means, and almost with the connivance of the government, were the elements of a party brought into existence, which, though averse, from principle, to many parts of the civil, and the whole of the ecclesiastical system of the country, yet appeared, in the original thinness of its ranks, and the cautious timidity of its movements, a manageable and useful auxiliary of the crown against the church. But events were at hand which showed to the Spanish government what sort of spirit they had raised, and what an arduous work it would be to lay it. The French revolution broke out; the declaration of the rights of man re-echoed through the Peninsula, and numbers were instantaneously initiated in the deepest mysteries of revolutionary philosophy. The Spanish liberals had hitherto been exceedingly moderate in their views and wishes. Though sceptics upon religious subjects, they would have been contented with the just liberty of thinking for themselves, and being allowed the free use of their books. Far from being the enemies, they had been, till that period, the staunch supporters of the throne. The Spanish liberals of the original school had all the characteristics of an aristocracy—an intellectual peerage, who, by the assertion of their own mental rights, seemed likely to diffuse the benefits of a gradual, but general, emancipation. But when a philosophical mob began to gather about them; when the republican catechisms of France had found their way to the hands of those whose only chance of figuring in the world was a complete overtum of the social system;

when