Witiza's defence has been ingeniously undertaken by the Père Tailhan in his interesting notes to the rhyming chronicler of Cordova, a contemporary of Witiza. Here we meet the clement Prince of Tuy, whose mildness, in spite of a natural impetuosity held in check, was his greatest crime in the eyes of immediate posterity, unswervingly kind to all who approached and addressed him, described by his enemies, the Moors, as the most just and pious of all the Christian kings of his time, and a man of blameless life. Count Fernando Gonzalez refers to him as "a powerful king, of indomitable courage and of noble heart." The anonymous writer of Cordova, who was in a position to judge, writes of his reign as one of peace and prosperity and universal happiness. Was the devil incarnate the invention of the four respectable archbishops? Of course the dull and bigoted Mariana follows in their footsteps. Don José Godoz Alcantara is of a different opinion:--"Witiza," he writes, "initiated his reign by the most ample act of generosity. He restored to the destitute their dignities and wealth, publicly burnt all proofs and denunciations of conspiracy; wishing to cure a degenerate aristocracy of the passion of power, and direct their spirit of sedition to the arts of peace, he knocked down Wamba's famous walls, and according to the picturesque phrase of the Archbishop Don Rodrigo, 'pretended to turn arms into spades.'"[5] The only crime the traveller in Spain will find it difficult to forgive, is this act of vandalism in knocking down Wamba's walls. He could have exhorted his subjects to practise the arts of peace, all in leaving these great walls untouched in their monumental beauty. But this is what the reformers of humanity never will do. They are never happy until they have sacrificed the picturesque on the altar of utility. Witiza, we see, was in advance of his age. He was a "modern" man, a creature of fads and fantasies. This was how he came by his quaint notion of refining the deplorable morals of Toledo. He could think of no other way of steming the tide of general sensuality but in legalising polygamy. So fierce a race fallen into bad habits was hardly to be sermonised with success. The legal state of polygamy he regarded, along with Oriental sages, as preferable to indiscriminate and wide-spread libertinage. It is still a nice question unsolved in civilised Europe whether several legitimate wives or their unrecognised substitutes constitute a higher or lower state of morality. Witiza was only less hypocritical than civilised Europe, that is all. But to pretend that bigamy is more scandalous than private disorder is absurd. Witiza's notion of reform may have been primitive and instructive, but it does not justify the legend of his own evil life. To begin with, if he had been the degraded sensualist the archbishops and Mariana describe him, he would not have troubled about reform at all, and he may have had