Two of the most conspicuous faults among the Spanish race are pride and envy. Yet these defects may be explained without much puzzling, and, in a measure, pardoned. Spaniards, through all the process of their national development, have clung by preference to the calling of the soldier or the priest; that is, the only occupations which directly dissipate the revenue of the commonwealth. Since, therefore, they were thus inclined from earliest antiquity, as well as tutored by a crafty priesthood to believe that might or violence alone is right, the haughtiness of the Spanish people is a logical, and indeed inevitable, outcome of their history. Moreover, side by side with this erroneous theory that the only prowess and decorum of a people must consist in armed aggressiveness, as well as in a truculent and militant intolerance in matters of religion (or rather, of superstition), there arose the equally as mischievous and erroneous theory that the arts of peace were venal, despicable, and effeminate, or, in the current phrase of our contemporaries, "unworthy of a gentleman." "The Spaniards," wrote Fernández de Navarrete, "are so proud-hearted that they do not accommodate themselves to servile labour." Therefore this people chose their favourites and heroes in a semi-savage freebooter; never in a craftsman of gigantic merit, like the elder Berruguete, or Juan de Arfe, or Alonso Cano. Sometimes, as happened with the _reja_ of the Chapel Royal of Granada, they did not even trouble to record the surname of her best artificers. These men, in fact, exceptions to her universal rule, were coldly looked upon, or even persecuted.[75] Abundant proof is yet extant of this humiliation of her merchants, craftsmen, shopkeepers, as distinguished from her soldiery and clergy, gentry and nobility. Undoubtedly, beneath such scorn the former of these groups were sensitive to their position, and all the more acutely sensitive because of their inherent Spanish pride. In fact, so sensitive were they, that now and then the crown esteemed it prudent to appease their wounded vanity by certain declarations or emoluments. Thus, the _Repartimiento de Sevilla_ tells us that in the year 1255 Alfonso the Tenth rewarded several craftsmen of his capital of Seville with the title of _Don_, "a dignity," says Amador, "rarely bestowed at that time."[76] In 1556 Charles the Fifth resolved, in favour of the corporation of _artistas-plateros_ or "artist-silversmiths," that the masters of this craft, together with their wives, might dress in silk, "in that it was an art they exercised, and not an office" (Gestoso, _Diccionario de Artífices Sevillanos_, Vol. I., p. lx.), while Philip the Fourth decreed that they should not be forced to contribute to the equipment of his troops, but should only be invited to contribute, _just as with the nobles_. Nevertheless, Rico y Sinobas points out (_Del vidrio y de sus artífices en España_) that Philip the Fifth and Ferdinand the Sixth, on