And yet how different were the circumstances of the two nations, Spain was decadent, bankrupt, defeated; England was rising to the supreme heights of its greatness under Elizabeth and Cromwell. At the end of the sixteenth century, Spain had passed its splendid meridian and was falling into the grey obscurity of a clouded evening. It had quickly lost the great place which for a few years it had held in the world, every day brought a new failure, every year a new disaster; the great Armada had perished miserably on the dunes of Flanders and Holland, on the cliffs of Scotland and Ireland; a handful of valiant Dutchmen had defied its power and broken its wealth; the real enemy of Spain, that is France, had gathered itself together after forty years of ruin and misery, and had driven out the Spanish power. Indeed, so great, so overwhelming, was--as we can now see it--the ruin, that Philip II, who to the English imagination has stood for the embodiment of cruel and masterful malignity, has become to the historical student one of the tragic figures in history, a sincere, stupid, bigoted man, vainly striving to hold together the great empire which had been created by Ferdinand and Isabella, by Cortez and Pizarro and Charles V. England, on the other hand, was rising from obscurity to its place as the mistress of the seas; Englishmen were raiding and plundering the New World, which Spain and Portugal had looked on as their own; England was sending out its sailors and merchants to all the seas, and to all lands, from the frozen north to the Indies. And again, Spain was possessed by a fierce and passionate love for the old religious order, it was the one country in which devotion to the forms and conceptions of mediaeval religion had proved unshakeable, while England was the representative power of the new religious temper, and was soon to hold almost the foremost place in the new intellectual life of Europe. And yet the drama of Spain is in all its most essential and intimate characteristics the same as that of England; represents on the one side the same overwhelming sense of the tragic conflicts of life, the same sense of the greatness, the splendour of human nature, which is most triumphant when most it seems to fail; and on the other side at least something of that exquisite, that almost unimaginable grace of the romantic comedy, of the world of Portia and Viola and Beatrice and Miranda. I do not think that the unity of the great art of Europe, the comparative insignificance of merely national characteristics and historical circumstances can find a more convincing illustration. * * * * *