If The Great Mass Of Travelers Voted According To Their Ignorance, The Majority In Favor Of Knowing Next To Nothing Would Be Overwhelming, And I Do Not Say They Would Be Altogether Unwise.

History itself is often of two minds about the facts, or the truth from them, and when you have stored away its diverse conclusions, and you begin to apply them to the actual conditions, you are constantly embarrassed by the misfits.

What did it avail me to believe that when the Goths overran the north of Spain the Vandals overran the south, and when they swept on into Africa and melted away in the hot sun there as a distinctive race, they left nothing but the name Vandalusia, a letter less, behind them? If the Vandals were what they are reported to have been, the name does not at all characterize the liveliest province of Spain. Besides, the very next history told me that they took even their name with them, and forbade me the simple and apt etymology which I had pinned my indolent faith to.

I

Before I left Seville I convinced a principal bookseller, much against his opinions, that there must be some such brief local history of the city as I was fond of finding in Italian towns, and I took it from his own reluctant shelf. It was a very intelligent little guide, this _Seville in the Hand,_ as it calls itself, but I got it too late for use in exploring the city, and now I can turn to it only for those directions which will keep the reader from losing his way in the devious past. The author rejects the fable which the chroniclers delight in, and holds with historians who accept the Phosnicians as the sufficiently remote founders of Seville. This does not put out of commission those Biblical "ships of Tarshish" which Dr. Edward Everett Hale, in his graphic sketch of Spanish history, has sailing to and from the neighboring coasts. Very likely they came up the Guadalquivir, and lay in the stream where a few thousand years later I saw those cheerful tramp-steamers lying. At any rate, the Phoenicians greatly flourished there, and gave their colony the name of Hispalis, which it remained content with till the Romans came and called the town Julia Romula, and Julius Ctesar fenced it with the strong walls which the Moorish conquerors, after the Goths, reinforced and have left plain to be seen at this day. The most casual of wayfaring men must have read as he ran that the Moorish power fell before the sword of San Fernando as the Gothic fell before their own, and the Roman before the Gothic. But it is more difficult to realize that earlier than the Gothic, somewhere in between the Vandals and the Romans, had been the Carthaginians, whose great general Hamilcar fancied turning all Spain into a Carthaginian province. They were a branch of the Phoenicians as even the older, unadvertised edition of the _Encyclopedia Britannica_ will tell, and the Phoenicians were a sort of Hebrews. Whether they remained to flourish with the other Jews under the Moors, my _Sevilla en la Mano_ does not say; and I am not sure whether they survived to share the universal exile into which Islam and Israel were finally driven. What is certain is, that the old Phoenician name of Hispalis outlived the Roman name of Julia Romula and reappeared in the Arabic as Ishbiliya (I know it from my Baedeker) and is now permanently established as Seville.

Under the Moors the city was subordinate to Cordova, though I can hardly bear to think so in my far greater love of Seville. But it was the seat of schools of science, art, and agriculture, and after the Christians had got it back, Alfonso the Learned founded other schools there for the study of Latin and Arabic. But her greatest prosperity and glory came to Seville with the discovery of America. Not Columbus only, but all his most famous contemporaries, sailed from the ports of her coasts; she was the capital of the commerce with the new world, ruling and regulating it by the oldest mercantile tribunal in the world, and becoming the richest city of Spain. Then riches flowered in the letters and arts, especially the arts, and Herrera, Pacheco, Velasquez, Murillo, and Zurburan were born and flourished in Seville. In modern times she has taken a prominent part in political events. She led in the patriotic war to drive out the armies of Napoleon, and she seems to have been on both sides in the struggle for liberal and absolutist principles, the establishment of the brief republic of 1868, and the restoration of the present monarchy.

Through all the many changes from better to Worse, from richer to poorer, Seville continued faithful to the ideal of religious unity which the wise Isabel and the shrewd Ferdinand divined was the only means of consolidating the intensely provincial kingdoms of Spain into one nation of Spaniards. Andalusia not being Gothic had never been Aryan, and it was one of her kings who carried his orthodoxy to Castile and established it inexpugnably at Toledo after he succeeded his heretical father there. When four or five hundred years later it became a political necessity of the Catholic Kings to expel their Jewish and Moorish subjects and convert their wealth to pious and patriotic uses, Andalusia was one of the most zealous provinces in the cause. When presently the inquisitions of the Holy Office began, some five hundred heretics were burned alive at Seville before the year was out; many others, who were dead and buried, paid the penalty of their heresy in effigy; in all more than two thousand suffered in the region round about. Before he was in Valladolid, Torquemada was in Seville, and there he drew up the rules that governed the procedure of the Inquisition throughout Spain. A magnificent _quemadero,_ or crematory, second only to that of Madrid, was built:

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