United States or Ethiopia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
As for the Gauls and the Iberians, there is not a word about their first entrance into the country, for they are discovered there already at the first appearance of the country itself in the domain of history. The Iberians, whom Roman writers call Aquitanians, dwelt at the foot of the Pyrenees, in the territory comprised between the mountains, the Garonne, and the ocean.
Had she ever glimpsed the genealogy tables of the Benefacio family, from which Steve descended, she would have had the best time of all; coats of arms and family crests and mottoes would have been the vogue; a trip to the Pyrenees would have followed; mantillas and rebozos would have crowded her wardrobe, and Steve would have been forced to learn Spanish and cultivate a troubadourish air.
With valleys so made the mountains are indeed more awful than they might be in the Alps: but you never see them standing out and apart, and the mastering elevation of the Pyrenees is not apprehended until you come to the cirque or hollow at the end of each valley just underneath the main ridge; by that time you have climbed so far that you have halved the height of the barrier.
Here, for instance, is a convolvulus hawk father found killed on a mountain in Switzerland; there an Apollo I caught in the Pyrenees; here a "red burnet" with "five eyes" captured as we raced through the bracken on Clifton Downs; and there are "purple emperors" wired down to "meat" baits on the Surrey Downs.
But it will even then be very distant from you; and it is only after having been soiled by the dirty hands of all the Spanish post-masters that it will be allowed to pass the Pyrenees.
When the Franks, of German origin, burst into Gaul, and settled in the country north of the Loire, and afterwards carried their conquests to the Pyrenees, the Franks were regarded as enemies in the south of France.
His subjects told with pride how "his empire reached from the Arctic Ocean to the Pyrenees;" there was no monarch save the Emperor himself who ruled over such vast domains. But even the Emperor did not gather under his sway a grouping of peoples so strangely divided in race, in tongue, in aims, in history.
However, it appears that her desire to abstain henceforward from all political intrigue was looked upon incredulously for several years; since, in 1659, at the time of the Treaty of the Pyrenees being signed, Mazarin, replying to Don Louis de Haro, who required that the French Minister should restore Condé "to all his birthrights," still placed, as we have noticed, Madame de Longueville among the feminine trio, who, said he, "would be capable of governing or of overturning three great kingdoms."
That rich and extensive country, as far as the ocean, the Alps and the Pyrenees, was delivered to the barbarians, who drove before them, in a promiscuous crowd, the bishop, the senator and the virgin, laden with the spoils of their houses and altars."
The public feeling of the Bulgarians can alter nothing in this, so far as I am concerned. Bulgaria, the tiny little country between the Danube and the Balkans is not an object of sufficient size, I assure you, to attach to it any importance, or to push Europe for its sake into a war, from Moscow to the Pyrenees, from the North Sea to Palermo, when no one can foresee its end.
Word Of The Day