booty on which they were entitled to prey. This state of things was not improved when the full powers of government were placed in the hands of the weak Charles II. the period of whose reign is the most melancholy in Spanish history. The circumstance of a French prince being called to the Spanish throne, in obedience to that will of Charles II. which has been so much censured, was by no means unfortunate for Spain, either in a literary or political point of view. The war, which was partly a civil contest, and which was maintained for twelve years before the new Philip, the fifth of that name, was tranquilly seated on his throne, seemed, however, to threaten the annihilation of the last remnant of Spanish national vigour. The mild and rigidly pious Philip V. was, by his personal character and mode of thinking, previously related to the nation to which he now belonged. He manifested no desire to transplant into Spain the literature of France, which at that time began to exercise an influence over the whole of Europe. The foreigners whose promotion to important posts during the reign of the first Bourbon in Spain, rendered them the objects of much patriotic jealousy, were Italians and Irishmen, but in no instance Frenchmen. The French influence operated in Spain, only on the wavering politics of the cabinet of Madrid; the change of the reigning dynasty produced therefore little or no influence on Spanish literature. All that Philip V. did to promote the advancement of learning on the French model, was wholly confined to the celebrated institution of royal academies, among which the academy of history, and still more, the academy of the Spanish language and polite literature,[570] may be regarded as having operated influentially on the literature of Spain. But this last-mentioned academy, which was established in the year 1714, was never intended for the annihilation of the spirit and peculiar forms of Spanish poetry and eloquence. The cultivation of the Spanish language was its especial care, and its labours for the accomplishment of that object were crowned by the production of its excellent dictionary. The efforts made by some members of this academy to form the taste of their countrymen on the model of that of France, must be attributed to themselves individually. They merely followed the new current of French taste, in common with almost every person in Europe, who had then any pretensions to polite education. If these innovators must be called a literary court party, the term can only be employed in the sense in which it would, with equal propriety, apply to the same sort of party existing in other countries, where the French style became the fashionable style of courts, and was, with courtier-like complaisance, generally adopted by authors both in verse and in prose.