Page:History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic Vol. II.djvu/318

294 294 ITALIAN WARS. PART II. to Strengthen himself in his new conquests, and prepare to maintain them until he could receive fresh reinforcements from home, or to abandon them altogether and retreat across the Alps, before the allies could muster in sufficient strength to oppose him. With the indiscretion characteristic of his whole enterprise, he embraced a middle course, and lost the advantages which would have resulted from the exclusive adoption of either. in the earlier and less important periods. It should be remembered, however, that his work was to be the great national repository of facts, interesting to his own coun- trymen, but which, from difficulty of access to authentic sources, could never before be fully exhibited to their inspection. But, whatever be thoug-ht of his redundancy, in this or the subsequent parts of his nar- rative, it must be admitted that he has uniformly and emphatically di- rected the attention of the reader to the topics most worthy of it ; sparing no pains to illustrate the constitutional antiquities of the country, and to trace the gradual formation of her liberal polity, in- stead of wasting his strength on mere superficial gossip, like most of the chroniclers of the period. There is no Spanish historian less swayed by party or religious prejudice, or by the feeling of na- tionality, which is so apt to over- flow in the loyal effusions of the Castilian writers. This laudable temperance, indeed, has brought on him the rebuke of more than one of his patriotic countrymen. There is a sobriety and coolness in liis estimate of historical evidence, equally removed from temerity on the one hand, and credulity on tlic other ; in short, his whole manner is that of a man conversant with public business, and free from the closet pedantry, which too often characterizes the monkish annalists. The greater part of his life was passed under the reign of Charles v., when the spirit of the nation was not yet broken by arbitrary power, nor debased by the melan- choly superstition which settled on it under his successor ; an age, in which the memory of ancient liber- ty had not wholly faded away, and when, if men did not dare express all they thought, they at least thought with a degree of indepen- dence, which gave a masculine character to their expression. In this, as well as in the liberality of his religious sentiments, he may be compared favorably with his cele- brated countryman Mariana, who, educated in the cloister, and at a pe- riod when the nation was schooled to maxims of despotism, exhibits few glimpses of the sound criticism and reflection, which are to be found in the writings of his Aragonese ri- val. The seductions of style, how- ever, the more fastidious selection of incidents, in short, the superior graces of narration, have given a wider fame to the former, whose works have passed into most of the cultivated languages of Europe, while those of Zurita remain, as far as I am aware, still undisturbed in the vernacular.