13k. VII. Ch. I. SUBJECT IMPEEFECTLY KNOWN. 243 supplying their wants, and Italy also contributed her influence, though less directly than the other two. In the meantime the Moors were more steadily elaborating tlieir very ornate but rather flimsy style of art in the southern part of the Peninsula, and occasionally contributed workmen and ideas whose influence may be traced almost to the foot of the Pyrenees. When all this passed away with the Middle Ages, they borrowed the Renaissance style of the Italians, but used its Doric and Corinthian details more literally and with less adaptation than any other nation. With these classical materials they erected churches which were larger and more gorgeous than those of the previous styles, and admired them with the same i;nreasoning devotion they had bestowed on their predecessors. So far as we at present know, this peculiarity is unique in the history of architecture. Some nations are content to worship in barns, or to dispense with temples altogether. It is not, tlierefore, surprising that they should have no architecture, or should throw it aside as the Scotch did the moment they could shake off its trammels. But the Spaniards loved art. They delighted in the display of architectural magnificence, and indulged in pomp and ceremonial observances beyond any other people on the Continent. The singularity is, that though endowed with the love of architec- ture, and an intense desire to possess its products, nature seems to have denied to the Spaniard the inventive faculty necessary to enable him to supply himself with the productions so indispensable to his intellectual nature. We can perfectly understand how, among so Teutonic a people as the Scotch, architecture should be found planted in an uncongenial soil and perisli with the first blast of winter ; but what seems unique is that, planted where both the soil and climate seem so thoroughly congenial as they do in Spain, it should still remain exotic and refuse to be acclimatized. If we knew who the Spaniards were we might be able to explain these phenomena, but we know so little of the ethnography of Spain that at present this source of information is not available. The term " Iberian " hardly conveys a distinct idea to the mind. The first im- pulse is to say they must have been Turanian ; but, if so, where are their tombs? Few tumuli or rude-stone monuments exist in Spain, and fewer traces of sepulchral rites or ancestral worship, and these have been so imperfectly described that it is difiicult to reason regard- ing them, but unless they do exist we are safe in asserting that no Turanian people lived in historic times in Spain. From history we know that the Phoenicians occupied the coast-line at least all round the southern part of the Peninsula, and their settlements probably penetrated some way into the interior. The facility with which the Moors conquered and colonized the country, is in itself sufiicient to prove that a people of cognate race had occupied the land long before
