We shall hardly look for forensic or deliberative eloquence in Spain. The whole constitution of things there, the political and ecclesiastical institutions of the country, and, perhaps we should add, the very genius of the people, were unfriendly to the growth of a plant like this, which flourishes only in the soil of freedom. The Spanish tribunals, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, whether in the ordinary course of their administration of justice, or in the dark proceedings of the Inquisition, took less cognizance of the influences of eloquence than those of any other Christian country of modern times. They dealt with the wheel and the fagot,--not with the spirit of persuasion. Nor was this spirit truly known or favored in the political assemblies of the kingdom, though it was not supplanted there by the formidable instruments familiar in the courts of justice. In the ancient Cortes of Castile, and still more in those of Aragon, there may have been discussions which were raised by their fervor to something like what we now call deliberative eloquence. We have, in fact, intimations of such discussions in the old chronicles; especially in those that record the troubles and violence of the great nobles in the reigns of John the Second and Henry the Fourth. But a free, living debate on a great political principle, or on the conduct of those who managed the affairs of the country,--such a debate as sometimes shook the popular assemblies of antiquity, and in modern times has often controlled the destinies of Christendom,--was, in Spain, a thing absolutely unknown. Even the grave and dry discussions, to which the pressure of affairs gave rise, were rare and accidental. There was no training for them; and they could be followed by none of the great practical results that are at once the only sufficient motive and reward that can make them enter freely into the institutions of a state. Indeed, whatever there was of discussion in any open assembly could occur only in the earlier period of the monarchy, when the language and culture of the nation were still too little advanced to produce specimens of careful debate; for from the time of Ferdinand and Isabella and the days of the _Comunidades_, the Cortes were gradually restrained in their privileges, until at last they ceased to be any thing but a part of the pageantry of the empire, and served only to record the laws they should themselves have discussed and modelled. From this period, all opportunity for the growth of political eloquence in Spain was lost. It would have been no more tolerated by one of the Philips than Lutheranism.