'When love is not a blasphemy, it is a religion.'

There is perhaps a subtle significance in the fact that the
greatest, the cruellest, the most barbarous civil war of modern
days, if not of all time, owed its outbreak and its long continuance
to the influence of a woman. When Ferdinand VII. of Spain died, in
1833, after a reign broken and disturbed by the passage of that
human cyclone, Napoleon the Great, he bequeathed his kingdom, in
defiance of the Salic law, to his daughter Isabella. Ferdinand's
brother Charles, however, claimed the throne under the very just
contention that the Salic law, by which women were excluded from the
heritage of the crown, had never been legally abrogated.

This was the spark that kindled in many minds ambition, cruelty,
bloodthirstiness, self-seeking and jealousy--producing the morale,
in a word, of the Spain of sixty years ago. Some sided with the
Queen Regent Christina, and rallied round the child-queen because
they saw that that way lay glory and promotion. Others flocked to
the standard of Don Carlos because they were poor and of no
influence at Court. The Church as a whole raised its whispering
voice for the Pretender. For the rest, patriotism was nowhere, and
ambition on every side. 'For five years we have fought the
Carlists, hunger, privation, and the politicians at Madrid! And the
holy saints only know which has been the worst enemy,' said General
Vincente to Conyngham when explaining the above related details.

And indeed the story of this war reads like a romance, for there
came from neutral countries foreign legions as in the olden days.
From England an army of ten thousand mercenaries landed in Spain,
prepared to fight for the cause of Queen Christina, and very