At the same time it must be remembered that this fluid is applied with greater prodigality in washing their inside than their outside. Indeed, a classical author remarks that the Spaniards only learnt the use of _hot_ water, as applicable to the toilette, from the Romans after the second Punic war. Their baths and _thermæ_ were destroyed by the Goths, because they tended to encourage effeminacy; and those of the Moors were prohibited by the Gotho-Spaniards partly from similar reasons, but more from a religious hydrophobia. Ablutions and lustral purifications formed an article of faith with the Jew and Moslem, with whom “cleanliness is godliness.” The mendicant Spanish monks, according to their practice of setting up a directly antagonist principle, considered physical dirt as the test of moral purity and true faith; and by dining and sleeping from year’s end to year’s end in the same unchanged woollen frock, arrived at the height of their ambition, according to their view of the odour of sanctity, insomuch that Ximenez, who was himself a shirtless Franciscan, induced Ferdinand and Isabella, at the conquest of Granada, to close and abolish the Moorish baths. They forbade not only the Christians but the Moors from using anything but holy water. Fire, not water, became the grand element of inquisitorial purification. [Sidenote: CHOCOLATE.] The fair sex was warned by monks, who practised what they preached, that they should remember the cases of Susanna, Bathsheba, and La Cava,--whose fatal bathing under the royal palace at Toledo led to the downfall of the Gothic monarchy. Their aqueous anathemas extended not only to public, but to minutely private washings, regarding which Sanchez instructs the Spanish confessor to question his fair penitents, and not to absolve the over-washed. Many instances could be produced of the practical working of this enjoined rule; for instance, Isabella, the favourite daughter of Philip II., his eye, as he called her, made a solemn vow never to change her shift until Ostend was taken. The siege lasted three years, three months, and thirteen days. The royal garment acquired a tawny colour, which was called _Isabel_ by the courtiers, in compliment to the pious princess. Again, Southey relates that the devout Saint Eufraxia entered into a convent of 130 nuns, not one of whom had ever washed her feet, and the very mention of a bath was an abomination. These obedient daughters to their Capuchin confessors were what Gil de Avila termed a sweet garden of flowers, perfumed by the good smell and reputation of sanctity, “_ameno jardin de flores, olorosas por el buen odor y fama de santidad_.” Justice to the land of Castile soap requires us to observe that latterly, since the suppression of monks, both sexes, and the fair especially, have departed from the strict observance of the religious duties of their excellent grandmothers. Warm baths are now pretty generally established in the larger towns. At the same time, the