[28] Cf. the sayings, _Poderoso caballero es don Dinero; Dadivas quebrantan peñas; Dineros son calidad, etc._ Sancho goes to govern the island of Barataria “with a very great desire to make money.” The tendency is still to hoard, rather than invest, as did Don Bernard de Castil Blazo in _Gil Blas_, keeping 50,000 ducats in a chest in his house. [29] Spaniards prefer to enjoy time as a gift sent by the gods, than to waste it in trying to spend it too nicely. _El tiempo lo da Dios; Dios mejora las horas; Con el tiempo maduran las uvas._ To a peasant two o’clock on a day of March is “four more hours of sun.” Time is not parcelled out mechanically into tiny divisions by clocks. Distances are given by hours--an hour to a league. The Catalans are less lavish of the minutes; to a stranger asking the distance to a village near Tarragona, a peasant answered cannily in Catalan, “un cuart y mitj”--that is, the village was a quarter of an hour and half a quarter of an hour distant. Curiously the Catalans give the hour as in German, _e.g._ half-past eight is _dos cuarts de nou--halb Neun_. [30] “El Caballero encantado,” 1909: “Viven en un mundo de ritualidades, de fórmulas, de trámites y recetas. El lenguaje se ha llenado de aforismos, de lemas y emblemas; las ideas salen plagadas de motes, y cuando las acciones quieren producirse andan buscando la palabra en que han de encarnarse y no acaban de elegir.” The Spaniards speak with conviction of the great gulf fixed between word and deed:--_del dicho al hecho hay gran trecho; Los dichos en nos, los hechos en Dios_. [31] Cf. a speaker in the _Cortes_ in June, 1910: “Aquí no hay nada tan alto como las clases bajas.” [32] Don Ramiro de Maeztu has written of the aggressive assertion of personality--_innecesária afirmación de las personas_--in Spain. [33] _Lo que no lleva Cristo lo llera el fisco_--“What the Church leaves, the Treasury receives,” says an old proverb. [34] An author in Pérez Galdós’ _Fortunata y Jacinta_ says that the Spaniards, that _pícara raza_, are unaware of the value of time and of the value of silence. “You cannot make them understand that to take possession of other people’s silence is like stealing a coin.” “It is a lack of civilization.” By such un-Spanish criticisms Señor Pérez Galdós betrays the fact that he was not born in Spain. [35] The historian, Mariana, displayed more patriotism than accuracy when he wrote that Spain “is not like Africa, which is burnt by the violence of the sun nor is it assailed, as is France, by winds and frosts and humidity of air and earth.” [36] So Fr. Alonso de Espina wrote that, were an Inquisition established, “serían innumerables los entregados al fuego, los cuales si no fuesen aquí ... cruelmente castigados ... habrán de ser quemados en el fuego eterno.” La Fortaleza de la Fe. 1459.