The histories they depended on were a variety of heroic fiction whose theory of causation consisted of immediate causes and God. National limitations only appeared, therefore, in so far as they had contributed to national achievements. But to the tourist these limitations, and even the qualities which were simply strange to him, stood out as defects, and the necessary minutiæ of daily life as the unworthy preoccupations of degenerate descendants; while the people, accordingly, whose ancestors were represented as having done nothing but conquer for centuries, showed up as ordinary human beings, muddling along in the way customary among one's own countrymen. Yet successes of Spanish diplomacy were so recent, and the supremacy of Spanish infantry so terribly obvious, that strangers could not account for all this disillusion by assuming degeneration to be the sole reason; while it was likewise too sudden for them to see in it nothing but an example of the falsification of proportions inherent in all knowledge drawn from books or other second-hand sources. Their attitude to Spain when they revised their journals was thus mystification rather than contempt or disgust, though both the latter are usually present. This same unpreparedness to take a totally fresh point of view is even more marked in relation to religion. However greatly at odds the matter-of-fact foreigner and the matter-of-faith Castilian might be over details, both were equally unwilling to accept the illusions of to-morrow on that subject in place of the illusions of yesterday. The tendency to accept the face values of things theological was then as strong as to-day it is weak; but, with the possible exception of seventeenth-century Ireland, it was nowhere so strong as in Spain. The latter's place in Europe was bound up with leadership of the cause of Roman Catholicism; foreigners took this for granted, and the Spaniards unconsciously set a value on their creed apart from its relation to theological logic or religious experience—it had so long been the only rallying cry which could bring about a sinking of differences and achieve the temporary unity which was essential to success in war. But to the contemporary stranger, the varnish of the water of baptism was opaque, and the Celt, the Moor, the Pre-historic, the Outrageous-Pagan, and the all-pervading Jew, seemed all one thing, ultra-Holy-Roman. Another source of mystification—except to the Protestant, who knew exactly what it all meant and so went further astray than the rest, in the same direction. Socially, the unintelligible contradictoriness was as great. Witness one whom a Burgos gentleman invited to dinner. The dining-room was that in which the hostess lay ill in bed with a fever; and he remembered afterwards that he had behaved with grossly bad manners inasmuch as he had taken off his hat at meal-time.