When Seville fell, the port continued subject to the Almohade Emir of Fez. Alfonso the Learned subdued it without difficulty in 1262, and filled it with colonists from the north coast of Spain, from such places as Santander and Laredo. But the Philistine taint in two senses was never eradicated; Cadiz remained ever financial and commercial, and cared nothing for art. Her brightest and blackest days followed the discovery of America, when she soon eclipsed Seville as the mart for the produce of the New Indies. Her wealth, not once but many times, wellnigh proved her downfall. Threatened again and again by the Barbary corsairs, she saw a far more terrible foe before her walls in 1587, in the person of Sir Francis Drake, who inflicted incalculable injury on her shipping. Worse was to come nine years later, when the English, under the command of the Earl of Essex, scaled the walls, sacked the city from end to end, slaughtered the inhabitants, profaned the churches and burnt the public buildings, and sailed away with enormous booty. Yet so quickly did Cadiz recover from this terrific catastrophe, that she again tempted the cupidity of our countrymen in 1625. But this time the Dons were well prepared and gave our fleet so warm a reception that we were compelled to retire with heavy loss. The city attained its zenith of opulence in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, when it had become almost the exclusive entrepôt for the traffic between Southern Europe and the Americas. Numerous royal privileges and concessions secured it almost a monopoly of the trade. But no one organ can hope to escape an infection attacking the whole system. Spain in the eighteenth century was dying from that commonest of national diseases--dry-rot. Yet as late as 1770 Adam Smith did not hesitate to say that the merchants of London had not yet the wealth to compete with those of Cadiz, and a few years later the value of the bullion landed at its quays was estimated at 125 millions sterling. Yet it was this bloated, purse-proud city, strangely enough, that proved the ark of refuge for Spain when the innumerable hosts of Napoleon swarmed over the land. Here were preserved the insignia of national independence, and here, amid the thunder of guns and in the lap of the ocean, was born the New and Free Spain. Cadiz proved a second Covadonga. The focus of the constitutional movement, she was savagely assailed by the Absolutists and their French allies. The defence of Trocadero, on the other side of the bay, against the forces of the Duc d'Angoulême popularized the name of the place throughout Europe. The pages of Balzac abound in allusions to that mischievous and futile attempt of the Government of the Restoration to rivet on Spaniards fetters that no Frenchman would wear. Then came a French invasion of another sort, of the Romanticists--of De Musset and Gautier, and the long-haired followers of Byron.