The monk, the inquisitor, the Jesuit, these were the lords of
Spain,--sovereigns of her sovereign, for they had formed and fed the
dark and narrow mind of that tyrannical recluse. They had formed and fed
the minds of her people, quenched in blood every spark of rising heresy,
and given over a noble nation to bigotry, dark, blind, inexorable as the
doom of fate. Linked with pride, ambition, avarice, every passion of a
rich, strong nature, potent for good and ill, it made the Spaniard of
that day a scourge as dire as ever fell on man.

Day was breaking on the world. Light, hope, freedom, pierced with
vitalizing ray the clouds and the miasma that hung so thick over the
prostrate Middle Age, once noble and mighty, now a foul image of decay
and death. Kindled with new life, the nations teemed with a progeny of
heroes, and the stormy glories of the sixteenth century rose on awakened
Europe. But Spain was the citadel of darkness,--a monastic cell, an
inquisitorial dungeon, where no ray could pierce. She was the bulwark of
the Church, against whose adamantine front the wrath of innovation beat
in vain. In every country of Europe the party of freedom and reform was
the national party, the party of reaction and absolutism was the Spanish
party, leaning on Spain, looking to her for help. Above all, it was so
in France; and while within her bounds there was a semblance of peace,
the national and religious rage burst forth on a wilder theatre. Thither
it is for us to follow it, where, on the shores of Florida, the Spaniard
and the Frenchman, the bigot and the Huguenot, met in the grapple of
death.

In a corridor of the Escurial, Philip II. was met by a man who had long
stood waiting his approach, and who with proud reverence placed a
petition in the hand of the pale and sombre King. The petitioner was
Pedro Menendez de Aviles, one of the ablest and most distinguished