their own benefit and pleasure; the people existed to minister to them
and find funds for their extravagance. Each succeeding monarch was ruled
by some upstart favourite, until the climax was reached when Godoy, the
disgraceful Minister of Charles IV., and the open lover of his Queen,
sold the country to Napoleon. Then indeed awoke the great heart of the
nation, and Spain has the everlasting glory of having risen as one man
against the French despot, and, by the help of England, stopped his mad
career. Even then, under the base and contemptible Ferdinand VII., she
underwent the "Terror of 1824," the disastrous and unworthy regency of
Cristina, and the still worse rule of her daughter, Isabel II., before
she awoke politically as a nation, and, her innumerable parties forming
as one, drove out the Queen, with her _camarilla_ of priests and
bleeding nuns, and at last achieved her freedom.

For, whatever may be said of the last hundred years of Spain's history,
it has been an advance, a continuous struggle for life and liberty.
There had been fluctuating periods of progress. Charles III., a truly
wise and patriotic monarch, the first since Ferdinand and Isabella, made
extraordinary changes during his too short life. The population of the
country rose a million and a half in the twenty-seven years of his
reign, and the public revenue in like proportions under his enlightened
Minister, Florida Blanca. No phase of the public welfare was neglected:
savings banks, hospitals, asylums, free schools, rose up on all sides;
vagrancy and mendicancy were sternly repressed; while men of science and
skilled craftsmen were brought from foreign countries, and it seemed as
if Spain had fairly started on her upward course. But he died before his
time in 1788, and was followed by a son and grandson, who, with their
wives, ruled by base favourites, dragged the honour of Spain in the
dust. Still, the impulse had been given; there had been a break in the
long story of misrule and misery; Mendizábal and Espartero scarcely did