Page:History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic Vol. III.djvu/490

462 462 FERDINAND AND ISABELLA. II PART The inhabitant of modern Spain or Italy, who wanders amid the ruins of their stately cities, their grass-grown streets, their palaces and temples crum- bling into dust, their massive bridges choking up the streams they once proudly traversed, the very streams themselves, which bore navies on their bosoms, shrunk into too shallow a channel for the meanest craft to navigate, — the modern Spaniard who surveys these vestiges of a giant race, the to- kens of his nation's present degeneracy, must turn for relief to the prouder and earlier period of her history, when only such great works could have been achieved ; and it is no wonder that he should be led, in his enthusiasm, to invest it with a roman- tic and exaggerated coloring.^^ Such a period in Spain cannot be looked for in the last, still less in the seventeenth century, for the nation had then reached the lowest ebb of its fortunes ; ^^ nor in the excellence and fruitfulness of the 1594, "donde se solian labrarve- soil ; " which, " skilfully irrigated inte y treinta mil arrobas, no se by the waters of the Tagus, and labran hoi seis, y donde habia se- minutely cultivated, furnished every iiores de ganado de grandlsima can- variety of fruit and vegetable pro- tidad, han disminuido en la misma duce to the neighbouring city. " y mayor proporcion, acaeciendo lo While, instead of the sunburnt mismo en todas las otras cosas del plains around Madrid, it is de- comercio universal y particular. Lo scribed as situated "in the bosom cual hace que no hayaciudad de las of a fair country, with an ample principales destos reinos ni lugar territory, yielding rich harvests of ninguno, de donde no falte notable corn and wine, and all the other vecindad, como se echa bien de ver aliments of life." Cosas Memo- en la muchedumbre de casas que rabies, fol. 12, 13. — Viaggio, fol. estan cerradas y despobladas, y en 7, 8. la baja que han dado los arrenda- 86 Capmany has well expos- mientos de las pocas que se arrien- ed some of these extravagances, dan y habitan." Apud Mem. de (Mem. de Barcelona, tom. iii. part, la Acad, de Hist., torn. vi. p. 304. 3, cap. 2.) The boldest of them, ^7 A point which most writers however, may find a warrant in the would probably agree in fixing at declarations of the legislature it- 1700, the year of Charles II. 's self. " En los lugares dc obrages death, the last and most imbecile de lanas," asserts the cortes of of the Austrian dynasty. The