Stoical because it believed in pure justice; nourished by rude heroisms, inward visions, romances, and legends; exalted by mystic dialogues, and hardened by centuries of religious wars; the Spanish spirit, full of enthusiasm, entered upon the Renaissance, that sixteenth century which was to reveal the new continents across the ocean, the laws of Nature behind her mystery, and to create imperious personalities which opposed themselves to Fate. Then Spanish individualism broke out into mysticism, audacity, and adventure: it was the epoch of _conquistadors_, of politicians, of inquisitors, of Jimenez and Pizarro, Torquemada, Loyola, and Cortez. Spain broke through the circle of the Old World, fought in defence of Christian civilisation at Lepanto, and of Catholicism in Germany and Flanders; coveted the Mediterranean countries; colonised an immense and unknown continent; threatened Europe with the religious imperialism of Charles V. and Philip II., and, thanks to the legions of the Duke of Alba, imposed her will on the Pope. Her policy had the old Roman majesty and force; literature had found its "golden age"; philosophy proposed the vast harmonious solutions of Fox {37} Morcillo, and laid down the bases of natural and national law by the pens of Francisco de Vitoria and Domingo de Soto. It was a splendid prodigality of energy, creation, conquest, and heroism--the last stage of a history of violent stoicism, which announced a long and majestic decadence. Distrustful of hierarchies, Spanish individualism created social and democratic forms. Traditions, doctrines, customs, and laws denoted an exact sense of human equality. "Monachal democracy," said Menendez-Pelayo, in speaking of Spain, because the levelling of all classes offered certain conventual characteristics, and because there was a Christian basis to the fervour of the equalitarians; a "picaresque" democracy, wrote Salillas, alluding to the equality of the knight and the _picaro_, to the double phenomenon of a proud people making pretensions to nobility and a careless aristocracy continually drifting into democracy by reason of the lack of middle classes and the traditional idleness of the hidalgo. An anarchical democracy, inimical to hierarchy, proud and undisciplined, according to the analysis of Unamuno, in his profound work, _En torno al Casticismo_; a democratic Cæsarism, thought Oliveira Martins, for the absolutism of the monarch was not feudal royalty, but rather a principality of the Roman type. The king presided over a democracy of knights, mystics, adventurers, and rogues. This spirit of equality may be observed even in the formation of the Spanish aristocracy; the Gothic and hereditary nobility is foreign to the evolution of the Peninsular. The national aristocracy is to be found in the bosom of the Church; it is elective, subject to the current popular vicissitudes, to such a degree that the ecclesiastical