Such was the career and such the end of an adventurer whose influence and prestige often rose superior to those of royalty itself; who, by a perverted sentiment of enthusiasm, has passed into history as the exemplar of chivalry and the pattern of every martial excellence; who, though the sacrilegious despoiler of cathedrals and monasteries, is yet revered by the Church as one of her most devoted champions, whose brutality is applauded as zeal, whose perfidy is held up to public admiration as the highest development of worldly wisdom, and who to-day enjoys in the minds of his vainglorious countrymen a consideration not inferior to that accorded to the most venerated saint in the Roman Catholic calendar. Ecclesiastical fictions and popular ignorance prolonged the influence of the Cid far beyond the term of his natural life. The absurd legend which recounted the rout of Moorish armies at the sight of his corpse lashed to the saddle and borne at the head of crusading squadrons on many occasions, in subsequent times, inspired the Castilian chivalry with fresh devotion to their cause. The fables attributed to his charger Babieca and his sword Tizona--which, in imitation of Arabic custom, had each its history--were related with awe in every peasant’s hut on the plain and in the sierra. A sacred character attached to his remains. They worked innumerable miracles. They confounded the designs of unbelievers. Great virtue invested fragments of his coffin and of his garments. They were powerful talismans against danger in battle. They foiled the plots of conspirators. And yet there were few pious persons in the most superstitious age who did not possess far better claims to the attributes of a saint. The Cid was for the greater part of his life a rebel. He defied and oppressed his king. He served the Mohammedans, and, as their ally, invaded the Christian kingdom of France. Even in the poems intended to glorify his exploits he is represented as ridiculing the Pope. He burned churches and robbed the clergy. His perfidy became proverbial. He betrayed everybody. The barbarities he committed without compunction appalled even his own followers, long accustomed to the remorseless butchery of the helpless and the old. His cruelty was incredible. Of the virtues of patriotism, mercy, forgiveness, he knew nothing. Even his orthodoxy was justly liable to criticism. He was more indulgent to the infidel than, in the eyes of the zealots, became a true believer. He maintained a harem. Moslems formed a large proportion of his command. It was even suspected that he was not buried with the rites of the Church. In 1541, when his tomb was opened, his body was found wrapped in a Moorish mantle embroidered with arabesques and Arabic inscriptions. Nevertheless, the universal reverence in which he was held by the Spanish people, clergy and laity alike, induced Philip II., the most austere of royal bigots, to demand