It is in this undying, unabated attachment of the nation, indeed, that we see the most unequivocal testimony to the virtues of Isabella. In the downward progress of things in Spain, some of the most ill-advised measures of her administration have found favour and been perpetuated, while the more salutary have been forgotten. This may lead to a misconception of her real merits. In order to estimate these, we must listen to the voice of her contemporaries, the eye-witnesses of the condition in which she found the state, and in which she left it. We shall then see but one judgment formed of her, whether by foreigners or natives. The French and Italian writers equally join in celebrating the triumphant glories of her reign, and her magnanimity, wisdom, and purity of character. Her own subjects extol her as “the most brilliant exemplar of every virtue,” and mourn over the day of her death as “the last of the prosperity and happiness of their country”; while those who had nearer access to her person are unbounded in their admiration of those amiable qualities whose full power is revealed only in the unrestrained intimacies of domestic life. The judgment of posterity has ratified the sentence of her own age.[g] This portrait of Isabella as drawn by Prescott is glowing with an enthusiasm that is not self-ashamed. It admits frankly many evils, but in the sweep of eulogy they practically lose their effect and make no impression on the mind. Yet Prescott’s opinion was based on a thorough search of the authorities and upon the impartiality of a foreigner enamoured of a character purely by the good deeds he had learned to credit to her. It must therefore be received with respect, though it has, like all such summings-up, provoked severe disagreements. Even a writer in possession of no new facts could use the same data for violent denunciation. The most material attack on Prescott’s opinion is found in the very positive claim that Isabella’s daughter Juana was not mad, and that her mother’s treatment of her, founded on religious bigotry with which Juana did not sympathise, is therefore as cruel in kind as her mercilessness to the Jews. In the second place the genuineness of Isabella’s last will was questioned even by contemporaries, but it has never been disproved conclusively; admitting its authenticity, critics have said that in withdrawing from the nobility and others the various grants she had made them in payment of obligations, she committed an outrageous dishonesty or “posthumous royal plunder.” Even her simplicity of attire has been denied, and it is said that she outdid all history in her display when she saw fit to affect splendour. But this much even Prescott admitted.