Though it would be a dangerous overstatement to say that descent, pedigree, blood, or extraction go for nothing, we cannot consider the nature of the Spanish national character in general, as exhibited in the development of its science, art, literature, social institutions, and in its moral and material influence upon the history of the world, without seeing that many of the leading features of the drama that the Spaniards have played upon the theatre of both the Old and New World are referable to the effect of external circumstances--circumstances which, in our inability to work out the details of cause and effect, we must be content to call accidental. Who so likely to be isolated in the character of their literature, and deficient in comprehensiveness of thought, as the nation with the smallest sea-board and the most extreme geographical position in Europe? Who so probable to have spread their language over half America as the same? Who so fit to be good Catholics as the favoured of the Pope, the authorized converters of the heathen Indians, and the people whose national life was a crusade against the Mahometan on their own soil? Who, too, so born to the pride of purity of blood? There is much to account for all this, with which descent has nothing to do, although, perhaps, there is more than the explanation of all this accounts for. A ballad literature, rising to the level of the humbler epics, and a truly home-grown drama, are the self-evolved, indigenous elements of Spanish literature. Their material influences are to be found in the histories of America, the Indies, the Philippines, Micronesia, Italy, and the Mediterranean Islands. Portugal is Spain with a difference. More purely Iberic, and less Phœnician, from the first, it was also less Roman, less Arab, and very slightly Gothic. In Africa and India its influence has been greater, in America somewhat less than that of Spain. The extent to which the physical and moral characteristics of the Galicians and Estremadurans are intermediate and transitional, I am unable to state. * * * * * A refinement upon the doctrine of the Keltæ having been Iberian, and of the Celtiberi having been no Kelts at all, in the usual sense of the term, will be found when we come to the ethnology of Ireland. It consists in the possibility of one or both having been _Gaels_--Kelts, it is true, but not Kelts in the sense given to the word by the ancients. CHAPTER III. FRANCE.--IBERIAN BLOOD IN GAUL AS WELL AS THE SPANISH PENINSULA.--IBERIANS OF GASCONY, ETC.--LIGURIANS.--HOW FAR KELTIC.--BODENCUS.--INTERMIXTURE.--ROMAN, GERMAN, ARAB.--ALSATIA.--LORRAINE.--FRANCHE-COMTÉ.--BURGUNDY, SOUTHERN, WESTERN, AND NORTHERN FRANCE.--CHARACTER OF THE KELTS.--THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE.--BELGIUM.--ITS ELEMENTS.--KELTIC, GERMAN, AND ROMAN.--SWITZERLAND.--HELVETIA.--ROMANCE, FRENCH, AND GERMAN LANGUAGES.