feared a repetition of stale commonplaces, and I now feel a pang of
retroactive self-reproach for not spending the whole evening after
dinner in reading up the story of that most storied city where this
Spanish castle received us. What better could I have done in the smoky
warmth of our hearth-fire than to con, by the light of the electric bulb
dangling overhead, its annals in some such voluntarily quaint and
unconsciously old-fashioned volume as Irving's _Legends of the Conquest
of Spain;_ or to read in some such (if there is any such other)
imperishably actual and unfadingly brilliant record of impressions as
Gautier's _Voyage en Espagne,_ the miserably tragic tale of that poor,
wicked, over-punished last of the Gothic kings, Don Roderick? It comes
to much the same effect in both, and as I knew it already from the notes
to Scott's poem of Don Roderick, which I had read sixty years before in
the loft of our log cabin (long before the era of my unguided Spanish
studies), I found it better to go to bed after a day which had not been
without its pains as well as pleasures. I could recall the story well
enough for all purposes of the imagination as I found it in the fine
print of those notes, and if I could believe the reader did not know it
I would tell him now how this wretched Don Roderick betrayed the
daughter of Count Julian whom her father had intrusted to him here in
his capital of Toledo, when, with the rest of Spain, it had submitted to
his rule. That was in the eighth century when the hearts of kings were
more easily corrupted by power than perhaps in the twentieth; and it is
possible that there was a good deal of politics mixed up with Count
Julian's passion for revenge on the king, when he invited the Moors to
invade his native land and helped them overrun it. The conquest, let me
remind the reader, was also abetted by the Jews who had been flourishing
mightily under the Gothic anarchy, but whom Don Roderick had reduced to
a choice between exile or slavery when he came to full power. Every one
knows how in a few weeks the whole peninsula fell before the invaders.