“The Pyrenean boundary,” says the Duke of Wellington, “is the most vulnerable frontier of France, probably the only vulnerable one;” accordingly she has always endeavoured to dismantle the Spanish defences and to foster insurrections and _pronunciamientos_ in Catalonia, for Spain’s infirmity is her opportunity, and therefore the “sound policy” of the rest of Europe is to see Spain strong, independent, and able to hold her own Pyrenean key. [Sidenote: THE PYRENEES.] While France therefore has improved her means of approach and invasion, Spain, to whom the past is prophetic of the future, has raised obstacles, and has left her protecting barrier as broken and hungry as when planned by her tutelar divinity. Nor are her highlanders more practicable than their granite fastnesses. Here dwell the smuggler, the rifle sportsman, and all who defy the law: here is bred the hardy peasant, who, accustomed to scale mountains and fight wolves, becomes a ready raw material for the _guerrilleros_, and none were ever more formidable to Rome or France than those marshalled in these glens by Sertorius and Mina. When the tocsin bell rings out, a hornet swarm of armed men, the weed of the hills, starts up from every rock and brake. The hatred of the Frenchman, which the Duke said formed “part of a Spaniard’s nature,” seems to increase in intensity in proportion to vicinity, for as they touch, so they fret and rub each other: here it is the antipathy of an antithesis; the incompatibility of the saturnine and slow, with the mercurial and rapid; of the proud, enduring, and ascetic, against the vain, the fickle, and sensual; of the enemy of innovation and change, to the lover of variety and novelty; and however tyrants and tricksters may assert in the gilded galleries of Versailles that _Il n’y a plus de Pyrénées_, this party-wall of Alps, this barrier of snow and hurricane, does and will exist for ever: placed there by Providence, as was said by the Gothic prelate Saint Isidore, they ever have forbidden and ever will forbid the banns of an unnatural alliance, as in the days of Silius Italicus: “Pyrene celsâ nimbosi verticis arce Divisos Celtis laté prospectat Hiberos Atque æterna tenet magnis _divortia_ terris.” If the eagle of Buonaparte could never build in the Arragonese Sierra, the lily of the Bourbon assuredly will not take root in the Castilian plain; so sings Ariosto: ---- “Che non lice Che ’l giglio in quel terreno habbia radice!” [Sidenote: THE PYRENEES.]