Yet even to the end of the seventeenth century the king swore to preserve the ancient privileges of Aragon and Catalonia. The "_fueros_" of Navarre were intact until 1840, and those of the Basque Provinces till 1874. The wonder is, not that the Spanish liberties were crushed, but that the memory of them should have continued so long, and after so many ages of repression should yet be a living force with which every statesman and ruler of Spain has still to make his account. The suppression of Spanish liberty had already begun under the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, but the death of Francis I. and the retreat of Charles V. into the cloister of San Juste definitely closes both the period of chivalry and of such liberties as existed through the Middle Ages in Europe. With Philip II. begins the era of statesmanship and of bureaucratic centralization, when nations were really ruled from the closet and with the pen, not with the sovereign's sword or by his presence in the field. It is difficult for an Englishman to sympathize with the view, but the period of Philip II. is still looked upon by the majority of Spaniards as the golden era of the external position of Spain. His absolutism, and his concentration in his own person of all civil and religious rights, are condoned in their eyes by the glory of his having made Spain the arbiter of Europe and the champion of Catholicism. But with his successor set in that strange and progressive decadence of intellectual power in the sovereigns of the Austrian dynasty in Spain, which ended in the almost idiotcy of the childless Charles II. Spain, which in the reign of Philip II. had all but imposed the sovereign of her choice in France, in the reign of Charles II. was ruled according to the intrigues and caprice of the court of Versailles. Philip V., the grandson of Louis XIV., though vastly superior to the late Austrian sovereigns, could never thoroughly emancipate himself from the tutelage of the country to whose armies he owed his crown; and the family degeneracy, which had shown itself in the Austrian sovereigns, again appeared in the Bourbon family, and communicated itself to the whole nation. The military and naval greatness of Spain disappeared, the very wish for constitutional liberty died out, commerce and literature were almost extinct, the population was declining in numbers and increasing in misery, the country was daily growing poorer, and its wealth was ebbing slowly away to other lands. The noble aristocracy of Spain, once so full of loyal self-respect in the age of the Cid, grovelled at the sovereign's feet, jealous only for precedence in matters of court etiquette, or clamorous for posts in the colonies as a means of corruption, and of enriching themselves by the plunder of the provinces they administered. The only king who showed some royal talent, and who intelligently endeavoured to effect the improvement of Spain, was Charles III. (1759--1788). Unfortunately both he and his able