Spain is a splendid territory, rich in Nature's wealth, but poor indeed in those attributes which alone truly elevate a nation--viz., a general firmness of character, desire of progress, love of liberty, purity of administration, and power of action. In Spain there exists no art, no science, but what is borrowed with bad grace from other countries. Literature, which once struggled for life, is now utterly prostrate. Its death dates back to the Inquisition, to that religious community who exercised all their holy zeal to kill the body and suffocate the mind. If there is absolute truth in Socrates' conception, that all human aspiration and effort should be generally directed towards the acquisition of knowledge, then surely are the Spaniards of to-day most aimless in their existence. In fact, the influence of the bigoted Middle Ages, when, with relentless severity, heresy was suspected in everything said, written, or done, was sufficient to destroy the taste for literature, had Spain even possessed a literary community. Philosophy or science can make no progress where reason fears to dwell. Certainly, Cardinal Ximenes, one of Spain's most enlightened men, struck with shame at the continued ignorance and mental darkness in which the priesthood were sunk, had the courage lent him by his station and loftier mind to found the University of Alcala de Henares at the commencement of the sixteenth century. He revised the cramped version of the Scriptures, substituting for it a rendering more adapted for intellectual acceptance by compiling at his own expense the famous Complutensian Polyglot, although crushing, at the instance of the Holy Office, all attempts to translate the Bible into the Spanish tongue. He also made a yet greater step in the advance of intellectual liberty by inculcating the law which excludes Papal bulls not sanctioned by the monarch. In spite, however, of this considerable improvement in the education of the ecclesiastical mind, notwithstanding this attempt at cleaning a portion of the Augean stables of darkness and superstition, the long chronic hatred entertained, by the Executive, of all liberty of thought, and their love of power, had become too engrained a habit to allow of much more being done in one lifetime than to temper it with the seeds of a possible improvement, and merely to insert the wedge of tolerance. All that could be tortured by the cunning of partial priests into the merest suspicion of heresy, in speech or in writing, was still punished with incarceration, confiscation, torments, and death, even by the sanction of this Cardinal patron of letters himself. Under these circumstances, literature of any other sort than that of romance, mysticism, or biographies of saints, now found but dangerous ground to take root; for wherever the author was, there were the priestly supervisors gathered together. Surely the birth of culture and enlightenment appears but in the funeral train of superstition.