It was the stake and the dungeon, a system of misrule, and the aspect of the merciless deeds committed by their governors on helpless multitudes, that destroyed the energies, and blighted the genius, of the people. When we read of such acts as the banishment of the Moriscos, and the history of all that high-hearted people suffered--torn from their native vales and hills, and cast out upon the stranger--we wonder what manner of men lived in Spain, and feel that these inhuman and impious deeds must have poisoned the very air. But, politically speaking, it is not the act, but its effects, that are so baneful; national crime influences by causing the degeneracy of the race. The youth may live a life of sin; it is the man that is the sufferer. And thus the heroes of Spain of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, might glory in their children of the sixteenth; but the infection of evil had touched these, and their descendants made good the awful denunciation,--that the children are to suffer for their parents' crimes--an annunciation of divine will, so carried out in the vast system of the world, though often omitted in particular instances, as to demonstrate that it is one of the laws bestowed by heaven to govern the human race. Among the men who, last of the Spaniards of renown, flourished at that epoch, Quevedo deserves particular mention. He was a man of genius--a man who acted as well as wrote, and displayed in both originality, penetration and rectitude; whose character was as admirable as his intellect. He was the victim, also, of the most frightful misrule; and the fate of Quevedo alone might be brought forward as an example of the infamy of the political institutions of Spain. Don Francisco Gomez de Quevedo Villegas, was born at Madrid in September 1580. His father, Pedro Gomez de Quevedo, was a courtier. He had been secretary to the empress Mary, and afterwards filled the same situation to queen Anne, wife of Philip II. His mother, donna Maria de Santibanez, also was attached to the court, and was a lady of the bedchamber to the queen. They were both of noble family, and descended from the most ancient landed proprietors of the Montana, in the Valle de Toranzo. His father died when he was a child; and he was brought up in the royal palace by his mother, but she also died when he was young[114], as we gather from one of his ballads, in which he gives a jocosely bitter account of the ill luck that pursued him through life. He went early to the university of Alcalà, and there his passion for study developed itself in all its intensity, so that we are told that he took his degree in theology, to the wonder of every body, at fifteen. This seems almost incredible; but it is plain he took it with credit, and a the expense of great labour.