more, and there was not a vestige of a human form on the wide-extended
plain.




CHAPTER III.

"Now History unfolds her ample page,
Rich with the spoils of Time."


Clearly to comprehend the internal condition of Spain at the period
of our narrative (1479)--a condition which, though apparently purely
national, had influence over every domestic hearth--it is necessary to
glance back a few years. The various petty Sovereignties into which
Spain had been divided never permitted any lengthened period of peace;
but these had at length merged into two great kingdoms, under the
names of Arragon and Castile. The _form_ of both governments was
monarchical; but the _genius_ of the former was purely republican,
and the power of the sovereign so circumscribed by the Junta, the
Justicia, and the Holy Brotherhood, that the vices or follies of the
monarch were of less consequence, in a national point of view, in
Arragon, than in any other kingdom. It was not so with Castile. From
the death of Henry the Third, in 1404, a series of foreign and civil
disasters had plunged the kingdom in a state of anarchy and misery.
John the Second had some virtues as an individual, but none as a king;
and his son Henry, who succeeded him in 1450, had neither the one nor
the other. Governed as his father had been, entirely by favorites,
the discontent of all classes of his subjects rapidly increased; the