"And you," said the other, "whose book do you study? What!"
"Cardinal Lucques."
"What say you, sir? seventeen folio volumes?"
It is a fact that as a traveller approaches Cordova, he looks along the horizon without discovering the sanctimonious and mysterious city, the city which wears the doctor's cap and tassels. At last his guide says, "Look there, it is down there among the bushes." And in reality, as he fixes his gaze upon the ground at a short distance in advance, there appear one, two, three, ten crosses, followed by domes and towers, belonging to the many churches which adorn this Pompeii of mediæval Spain.
To conclude, the mechanics shared the spirit of the upper classes: a master-shoemaker put on the airs of a doctor in shoemaking, and would level a Latin aphorism at a man as he gravely took his measure; the ergo of the scholar might be heard in the kitchens, and every dispute between a couple of porters took the sound and shape of philosophical demonstrations. We may add, that throughout the revolution, Cordova was the asylum of all fugitive Spaniards. What impression would the revolution of 1810 be likely to make upon a population educated by Jesuits, and secluded thus by nature, by teaching, and by art?
Had revolutionary ideas, such as are found in Rousseau, Mably, and Voltaire, happened to spread over the pampas and descend into this Spanish catacomb,—if we may so speak,—what response would they have been likely to find from those brains disciplined by the Aristotelian system to reject all new ideas, those
