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Rh ; while the Castillians, being of purer descent from them, speak even now a language little different from that in common colloquial use under the Emperors. The lower orders, in fact, speak an idiom nearer to it than do the educated classes, showing that the main race of the people, in Madrid for instance, remains essentially Roman. In Betica or Andalusia and the South of Spain, the descendants of Romans had become incorporated with those of Phœnician or Carthaginian and a few Greek colonists, forming together a race perhaps still more civilized than the new-comers. Thus the Moors found the people they had conquered in a high state of civilization, scarcely affected by former conquests, and they had only the merit of accepting and continuing the mental culture which they found there, and which they had not possessed in their native deserts.

The Goths and Vandals had swept like a hurricane over Spain; but they passed over it without leaving any considerable traces of their conquest. This is clear from the circumstance of so few Northern words remaining in the language of the country. At the entrance of the Moors into Spain, the dominant party there was certainly of Gothic descent; but they had already lost their Northern idioms, and were immerged in the mass of the people they had conquered, in the usual course of such events, as the Scandinavians soon did in Normandy and the Normans in England. When the races had begun to amalgamate in Spain, the distinctive lines might have been longer discernible in the South, if it had not been for the Moorish invasion. This soon repeated the events of former conquests, in the extermination of the fighting men and the enslaving of the other classes, who became feudatories or worse. Those who escaped to the mountains of the North constituted a nucleus of resistance, which was no doubt much strengthened in their subsequent contests by the aid of the