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"Oh, if you take it in that sense," said Caderousse, "it is another thing. But I thought you were a Catalan, and they told me the Catalans were not men to allow themselves to be supplanted by a rival. It was even told me that Fernand, especially, was terrible in his vengeance." Fernand smiled piteously. "A lover is never terrible," he said.

Each possessed a distinctive language, although Castilian gradually became the literary "Spanish," while Catalan, the speech of Aragon, was reduced to the position of an inferior. Despite the continuance of excessive pride in local traditions and institutions, the cause of Spanish nationality received great impetus during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella.

These grave Catalan nobles, fresh from their country estates, contrasted strongly with the more lively and joyous inhabitants of Valencia. Each addressed the other with ceremony, and listened with grave attention to the remarks of each speaker in turn.

Besides there are sixty editions of portions of the work, of compendiums of it and commentaries on it. Altogether 129 editions are extant. Of these there are sixteen Latin editions, forty-three French, five Italian, four Low Dutch, five Catalan, and one English. Fourteen appeared in the fifteenth century, thirty-eight in the sixteenth century, and seventeen in the seventeenth century.

The dying woman received him with an admirable presence of mind, that made M. Catalan think there had been an intention the night before to prevent any meeting between him and the person whom he was sent to interrogate.

And you have secured such bales of transparent white muslins, that one would think you intended to furnish a whole troupe of ballet-girls with saucer petticoats. Catalan lace you have got, to trim curtains, sheets, pillow-cases, and kitchen-towels with.

One of the sensations of the Exhibition of Spanish Old Masters at the Grafton Gallery in the autumn of 1913 was an altar panel, dated 1250, which was acquired by Mr Roger Fry in Paris, and catalogued as of the "Early Catalan School."

For only the day before I left a London magistrate admonished a man and woman placed in the dock before him for this heinous offence of dancing in the street, which gave so much pleasure to my Catalan youths and maidens all last night: "This is not a country in which people can afford to be jovial. You must cultivate a spirit of melancholy if you want to be safe. Go away and be as sad as you can."

Nor is it possible to speak of Spain as a whole, and of what she is likely to make of the present impulse towards national growth and industrial prosperity, without remembering that her population counts, among its rapidly increasing numbers, the far-seeing and business-like, if somewhat selfish, Catalan, with a language of his own; the dreamy, pleasure-loving Andaluz; the vigorous Basque, whose distinctive language is not to be learned or understood by the people of any other part of Spain; the half-Moorish Valencian and the self-respecting Aragonese, who have always made their mark in the history of their country, and were looked upon as a foreign element in the days when their kingdom and that of Leon were united, under one crown, with Castile.