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Page 55
All things in common, nature should produce,
Without sweat or endeavor: Treason, felony,
Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine,
Would I not have; but nature should bring forth,
Of its own kind, all foizon, all abundance,
To feed my innocent people."
But above all, in the three fugitive vagabonds who remained in
possession of the island of Bermuda, on the departure of their comrades,
and in their squabbles about supremacy, on the finding of their
treasure, I see typified Sebastian, Trinculo, and their worthy companion
Caliban:
"Trinculo, the king and all our company being drowned,
we will inherit here."
"Monster, I will kill this man; his daughter and I will be king and
queen, (save our graces!) and Trinculo and thyself shall be viceroys."
I do not mean to hold up the incidents and characters in the narrative
and in the play as parallel, or as being strikingly similar: neither
would I insinuate that the narrative suggested the play; I would only
suppose that Shakspeare, being occupied about that time on the drama of
the Tempest, the main story of which, I believe, is of Italian origin,
had many of the fanciful ideas of it suggested to his mind by the
shipwreck of Sir George Somers on the "still vext Bermothes," and by the
popular superstitions connected with these islands, and suddenly put in
circulation by that event.
* * * * *
PELAYO AND THE MERCHANT'S DAUGHTER.
BY THE AUTHOR OF THE SKETCH-BOOK.
It is the common lamentation of Spanish historiographers, that, for an
obscure and melancholy space of time immediately succeeding the conquest
of their country by the Moslems, its history is a mere wilderness of
dubious facts, groundless fables, and rash exaggerations. Learned men,
in cells and cloisters, have worn out their lives in vainly endeavoring
to connect incongruous events, and to account for startling
improbabilities, recorded of this period. The worthy Jesuit, Padre
Abarca, declares that, for more than forty years during which he had
been employed in theological controversies, he had never found any so
obscure and inexplicable as those which rise out of this portion of
Spanish history, and that the only fruit of an indefatigable, prolix,
and even prodigious study of the subject, was a melancholy and
mortifying state of indecision. [Footnote: PADRE PEDRO ABARCA. Anales
de Aragon, Anti Regno, F2.] During this apocryphal period, flourished
PELAYO, the deliverer of Spain, whose name, like that of William
Wallace, will ever be linked with the glory of his country, but linked,
in like manner, by a bond in which fact and fiction are inextricably
interwoven.
The quaint old chronicle of the Moor Rasis, which, though wild and
fanciful in the extreme, is frequently drawn upon for early facts by
Spanish historians, professes to give the birth, parentage, and whole
course of fortune of Pelayo, without the least doubt or hesitation. It
makes him a son of the Duke of Cantabria, and descended, both by father
and mother's side, from the Gothic kings of Spain. I shall pass over the
romantic story of his childhood, and shall content myself with a scene
of his youth, which was spent in a castle among the Pyrenees, under
the eye of his widowed and noble-minded mother, who caused him to be
instructed in everything befitting a cavalier of gentle birth. While the
sons of the nobility were revelling amid the pleasures of a licentious
court, and sunk in that vicious and effeminate indulgence which led
to the perdition of unhappy Spain, the youthful Pelayo, in his rugged
mountain school, was steeled to all kinds of hardy exercise. A great
part of his time was spent in hunting the bears, the wild boars, and the
wolves, with which the Pyrenees abounded; and so purely and chastely was
he brought up, by his good lady mother, that, if the ancient chronicle
from which I draw my facts may be relied on, he had attained his
one-and-twentieth year, without having once sighed for woman!
Nor were his hardy contests confined to the wild beasts of the forest.
Occasionally he had to contend with adversaries of a more formidable
character. The skirts and defiles of these border mountains were often
infested by marauders from the Gallic plains of Gascony. The Gascons,
says an old chronicler, were a people who used smooth words when
expedient, but force when they had power, and were ready to lay their
hands on every thing they met. Though poor, they were proud; for there
was not one who did not pride himself on being a hijo-dalgo, or the son
of somebody.
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