The annals of the times teem with illustrious instances
of high-wrought courtesy, romantic generosity, lofty
disinterestedness, and punctilious honor, that warm the very soul to
read them. These have furnished themes for national plays and poems,
or have been celebrated in those all-pervading ballads, which are as
the life-breath of the people, and thus have continued to exercise
an influence on the national character, which centuries of vicissitude
and decline have not been able to destroy; so that, with all their
faults, and they are many, the Spaniards, even at the present day,
are, on many points, the most high-minded and proud-spirited people of
Europe. It is true, the romance of feeling derived from the sources
I have mentioned, has, like all other romance, its affectations and
extremes. It renders the Spaniard at times pompous and
grandiloquent, prone to carry the pundonor, or point of honor,
beyond the bounds of sober sense and sound morality, disposed, in
the midst of poverty, to affect the grande caballero, and to look down
with sovereign disdain upon "arts mechanical," and all the gainful
pursuits of plebeian life; but this very inflation of spirit, while it
fills his brain with vapors, lifts him above a thousand meannesses,
and though it often keeps him in indigence, ever protects him from
vulgarity.
In the present day, when popular literature is running into the
low levels of life, and luxuriating on the vices and follies of
mankind; and when the universal pursuit of gain is trampling down
the early growth of poetic feeling, and wearing out the verdure of the
soul, I question whether it would not be of service for the reader
occasionally to turn to these records of prouder times and loftier
modes of thinking; and to steep himself to the very lips in old
Spanish romance.
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