To return, however.  The Austrian kings of Spain had brought her only ruin.  With the Bourbons it was hoped a better era had opened, but it was only exchanging one form of misrule for another.  The kings existed for their own benefit and pleasure; the people existed to minister to them and find funds for their extravagance.  Each succeeding monarch was ruled by some upstart favourite, until the climax was reached when Godoy, the disgraceful Minister of Charles IV., and the open lover of his Queen, sold the country to Napoleon.  Then indeed awoke the great heart of the nation, and Spain has the everlasting glory of having risen as one man against the French despot, and, by the help of England, stopped his mad career.  Even then, under the base and contemptible Ferdinand VII., she underwent the “Terror of 1824,” the disastrous and unworthy regency of Cristina, and the still worse rule of her daughter, Isabel II., before she awoke politically as a nation, and, her innumerable parties forming as one, drove out the Queen, with her camarilla of priests and bleeding nuns, and at last achieved her freedom.

For, whatever may be said of the last hundred years of Spain’s history, it has been an advance, a continuous struggle for life and liberty.  There had been fluctuating periods of progress.  Charles III., a truly wise and patriotic monarch, the first since Ferdinand and Isabella, made extraordinary changes during his too short life.  The population of the country rose a million and a half in the twenty-seven years of his reign, and the public revenue in like proportions under his enlightened Minister, Florida Blanca.  No phase of the public welfare was neglected:  savings banks, hospitals, asylums, free schools, rose up on all sides; vagrancy and mendicancy were sternly repressed; while men of science and skilled craftsmen were brought from foreign countries, and it seemed as if Spain had fairly started on her upward course.  But he died before his time in 1788, and was followed by a son and grandson, who, with their wives, ruled by base favourites, dragged the honour of Spain in the dust.  Still, the impulse had been given; there had been a break in the long story of misrule and misery; Mendizabal and Espartero scarcely did more than lighten the black canopy of cloud overhanging the country for a time; but at last came freedom, halting somewhat, as must needs be, but no longer to be repressed or driven back by the baneful influence known as palacioe, intrigues arising in the immediate circle of the Court.

CHAPTER II

TYPES AND TRAITS