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I have heard Wellington calumniated in this proud scene of his triumphs, but never by the old soldiers of Aragon and the Asturias, who assisted to vanquish the French at Salamanca and the Pyrenees. I have heard the manner of riding of an English jockey criticized, but it was by the idiotic heir of Medina Celi, and not by a picador of the Madrilenian bull ring.
An even greater scholar than these was Luke Wadding, the eminent Franciscan who founded the convent of St. Isidore at Rome. At Louvain was John Colgan, a Franciscan like Wadding, a man who did much for Irish ecclesiastical history. And at home in Ireland, as parish priest of Tybrid in Tipperary, was the celebrated Dr. Geoffrey Keating the historian, once a student at Salamanca.
Here at Valcuebo and later, when winter came, in the great hall of the Dominican convent at Salamanca, known as the "De Profundis" hall, where the monks received guests and held discussions, the Idea of Columbus was ventilated and examined.
However, as men and women frequently passed on donkeys and little ponies, we were not too proud to be set right by them, and by dint of diligent inquiry we at length arrived at Pitiegua, four leagues from Salamanca, a small village, containing about fifty families, consisting of mud huts, and situated in the midst of dusty plains, where corn was growing in abundance.
One of their officers came to dine with me that day, and he was in the act of reporting their capture, when my orderly-book was brought at the moment, containing an offer of reward for the detection of the thieves! On the 27th, we encamped on the banks of the Tormes, at a ford, about a league below Salamanca.
It happened some time afterwards that a blind man came to lodge at the house, and thinking that I should do very well to lead him about, asked my mother to part with me. He promised to receive me not as a servant, but as a son; and thus I left Salamanca with my blind and aged master. He was as keen as an eagle in his own calling.
According to Burke, "he was lawfully married in 1352 to the lady who passed during her entire life as his mistress, Maria de Padilla; he was certainly married to Blanche of Bourbon in 1353; and his seduction, or rather his violation, of Juana de Castro was accomplished by a third profanation of the sacrament, when the Bishops of Salamanca and Avila, both accessories to the king's scandalous bigamy, pronounced the blessing of the Church upon his brutal dishonor of a noble lady."
Spies had brought news that ten thousand men, under General Drouet, had marched for Salamanca; and that reports were current in the French camp that a very large force had crossed the frontier, at the northeastern corner of Portugal, with the evident design of recovering the north of Leon, and of cutting the main line of communication with France.
If the bishops fought among themselves, and if the low class people lived in a state of utter anarchy, the same spirit spread to or emanated from the nobility, of whom Salamanca had more than its share, especially as soon as the university was founded.
He did not at all correspond with Terence's ideas of a guerilla chief. He was a young man, of three or four and twenty; of slim figure and with a handsome, thoughtful face. He had been a student of divinity at Salamanca, but had killed a French officer in a duel, brought on by the insolence of the latter; and had been compelled to fly.
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