The proclamation of this pragmatic caused a dreadful fluttering of the dovecotes of the Calle Mayor. "Liars' parade" (the raised terrace before the church of St. Philip), the favourite lounge of the gilded youth, rose in revolt, the cadets of the Cordobas, the Mendozas, the Maquedas, the Leivas, the Manriques, and the rest of them, who had been called "Excellencies" and "Lordships" from their cradles, turned like the worm at last. Dress without gold they might, but they, the sons of Dukes, to be addressed with no more ceremony than dustmen--perish the thought! that they would not stand. So they and the rest of the rufflers, led captains, kept poets, bullies, and blacklegs, swept down the Calle Mayor carrying the grave Alcalde and all before them. Shops were shut, water was boiled to throw out upon the base "Corchetes," who dared to call such gallants plain "Mister," and the gloomy recluse in the Alcazar at the end of the street himself heard the row. When he was told the cause of it, he only remarked, so the chronicles say: "Bah! what does it matter to me what they are called? Let them be Lordships, or what they will, so long as they serve me well." And the pragmatic thus died on the day it was born, for no attempt was ever made to enforce it, and "Señorias" in the Calle Mayor remained as plentiful as blackberries in an English hedgerow. The isolation of Philip II. in his gloomy old age, together with the relaxation of the enactments already mentioned against the use of gold and silver tissues, had allowed luxury in dress {238} practically to go unchecked during the last years of the sixteenth century, and when the King died, in 1598, he left Spain, and particularly the capital, in a perfect frenzy of prodigality. The most brazen dissoluteness accompanied the blindest religious fanaticism; the exchequer was bankrupt, the fields untilled, the aforetime busy workshops of the south silent and abandoned, the people starving or flocking across the seas in search of the easily won gold that was ruining them; and when the coveted gold came to the few who survived the pursuit, it was lavished in insensate waste on the adornment of their outer persons--for they always fed frugally in that lean land--and most of the wealth left the country as fast as it entered it, the idleness it engendered being its net result to the country that won it.