love for a lady of the palace was created." A lady's name once introduced, it followed a fatal and romantic legend should be invented, and what prettier than conversion of the broken bridge on the enchanting marge of yellow Tagus into a syren's bath, with Rodrigo, the inflammable warrior, fresh from his encounter with dethroned gods and their emissaries in an enchanted palace, looking down on the maiden as she disported in the water from the windows of his luxurious Gothic palace? The legend once started, it is inevitable that the traitor should follow, and hence the elusive and mysterious figure of Count Julian, who advances into the picture on a mission of paternal vengeance, and treacherously opens the gates of Spain to the predatory Berbers. The Turks had entered Spain, and it needed some other explanation than national pluck, enterprise and determination to account for their almost unopposed approach towards Toledo; and what so likely an instrument of misfortune as the mythical father of the fabulous Florinda? So history was written, in all faith in those naïve days. Don Faustina de Bourbon remarks that this fable was not heard of before the dominion of the Asturian monarchs in southern Spain; not until the Cid took Valencia, and Alonzo basely seized Toledo, the kingdom of his Moorish protector and host. Such fables accord with the childish, superstitious yearning and need to associate the land's misfortunes with the personal iniquities of those who rule it. Roderick may have been no saint, and small blame to him in those grossly immoral times, but we need not attach to his shoulders the packet of national sins and disorders. Because the abuses among the clergy and the nobles had reached a repulsive depth of infamy, and public morals were in a lamentable state, is no reason to insist on his violation of Florinda, or refer as the Viscount Palazuelos does in his modern guide-book of Toledo, in an excess of unromantic austerity and disdain "to the guilty loves of Rodrigo and Count Julian's daughter."[7] There is no proof whatever that Rodrigo was the wretched sensualist the historians delight to paint. His crime was (and that the Gothic race shares with him) that he unworthily lost a large kingdom to a small invading force, and his shame lies in his inexplicable defeat. But for traitor there was never any need to invent Count Julian (whom the Père Tailhan insists was a certain Roman Urban who accompanied Tarik, and whose name was distorted into Julian), nor Florinda. Treachery existed nearer home in Witiza's family. Rodrigo had deposed Witiza, and the usurper was repaid by the treachery of Witiza's sons and his brother, Oppas, foolishly thinking the Berber raid would only prove a transient panic which would permit them to dispossess the usurper, and claim Witiza's throne. Instead of a mere raid, the invasion turned out one of the most astonishing conquests of history.