It would be impossible that any departure from a national standard should be long tolerated in Spain, where the language, the manners, the dress, the usages of the country, were much the same as they had been for generations,--as they continued to be for generations, long after Cervantes held up the mirror of fiction, to reflect the traits of the national existence more vividly than is permitted to the page of the chronicler. In the rude _romances_ of the fourteenth and the fifteenth century, the Castilian of the sixteenth might see his way of life depicted with tolerable accuracy. The amorous cavalier still thrummed his guitar, by moonlight, under the balcony of his mistress, or wore her favors at the Moorish tilt of reeds. The common people still sung their lively _seguidillas_, or crowded to the _fiestas de toros_,--the cruel bull-fights,--or to the more cruel _autos da fé_. This last spectacle, of comparatively recent origin,--in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella,--was the legitimate consequence of the long wars with the Moslems, which made the Spaniard intolerant of religious infidelity. Atrocious as it seems in a more humane and enlightened age, it was regarded by the ancient Spaniard as a sacrifice grateful to Heaven, at which he was to rekindle the dormant embers of his own religious sensibilities. The cessation of the long Moorish wars by the fall of Granada, made the most important change in the condition of the Spaniards. They, however, found a vent for their chivalrous fanaticism, in a crusade against the heathen of the New World. Those who returned from their wanderings brought back to Spain little of foreign usages and manners; for the Spaniard was the only civilized man whom they found in the wilds of America. Thus passed the domestic life of the Spaniard, in the same unvaried circle of habits, opinions, and prejudices, to the exclusion, and probably contempt of everything foreign. Not that these habits did not differ in the different provinces, where their distinctive peculiarities were handed down, with traditional precision, from father to son. But, beneath these, there was one common basis of the national character. Never was there a people, probably, with the exception of the Jews, distinguished by so intense a nationality. It was among such a people, and under such influences, that Philip was born and educated. His temperament and his constitution of mind peculiarly fitted him for the reception of these influences; and the Spaniards, as he grew in years, beheld, with pride and satisfaction, in their future sovereign, the most perfect type of the national character. CHAPTER III. ENGLISH ALLIANCE. Condition of England.--Character of Mary.--Philip's Proposals of Marriage.--Marriage Articles.--Insurrection in England. 1553, 1554.