Page:History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic Vol. I.djvu/282

138 138 TROUBLES IN CASTILE AND ARAGON. PART I. in the hands of favorites, who, finding themselves screened by the interposition of royal authority from the consequences of measures for which they should be justly responsible, sacrifice without re- morse the public weal to the advancement of their private fortunes. Thus the state, made to minister to the voracious appetites of many tyrants, suffers incalculably more than it would from one. So fared it with Castile under Henry the Fourth ; dismem- bered by faction, her revenues squandered on worthless parasites, the grossest violations of justice unredressed, public faith become a jest, the treasury bankrupt, the court a brothel, and private morals too loose and audacious to seek even the veil of hypoc- risy ! Never had the fortunes of the kingdom reach- ed so low an ebb since the great Saracen invasion. Chronicle of Henry's reign. On the occupation of Sepovia by the youno- Alfonso, after the battle of Olmedo, in 1467, the chronicler, together with the portion of his history then compiled, was un- fortunate enough to fall into the enemy's hands. The author was soon summoned to the presence of Alfonso and his counsellors; to hear and justify, as he could, cer- tain passages of what they termed his " false and frivolous narrative." Castillo, hoping little from a de- fence before such a prejudiced tri- bunal, resolutely kept his peace; and it might have gone hard with him, had it not been for his eccle- siastical profession. He subse- quently escaped, but never recov- ered his manuscripts, wiiich were frobably destroyed; and, in the ntroduction to his Chronicle, he laments, that he has been obliged to rewrite the first half of his mas- ter's reign. Notwithstanding Castillo's fa- miliarity with public affairs, his work is not written in the business- like style of Palencia's. Tlie sen- timents exhibit a moral sensibility scarcely to have been expected, even from a minister of religion, in the corrupt court of Henry W. ; and the honest indignation of the writer, at the abuses which he witnessed, sometimes breaks forth in a strain of considerable elo- quence. The spirit of his work, notwithstanding its abundant loy- alty, may be also commended for its candor in relation to the parti- sans of Isabella ; which has led some critics to suppose that it underwent a rifacimcnto after the accession of that princess to the throne. Castillo's Chronicle, more for- tunate than that of his rival, has been published in a handsome form under the care of Don Jose Miguel do Flores, Secretary of the Spanish Academy of History, to whose learned labors in this way Castilian literature is so much in- debted.