I could recall the story well
enough for all purposes of the imagination as I found it in the fine
print of those notes, and if I could believe the reader did not know it
I would tell him now how this wretched Don Roderick betrayed the
daughter of Count Julian whom her father had intrusted to him here in
his capital of Toledo, when, with the rest of Spain, it had submitted to
his rule. That was in the eighth century when the hearts of kings were
more easily corrupted by power than perhaps in the twentieth; and it is
possible that there was a good deal of politics mixed up with Count
Julian's passion for revenge on the king, when he invited the Moors to
invade his native land and helped them overrun it. The conquest, let me
remind the reader, was also abetted by the Jews who had been flourishing
mightily under the Gothic anarchy, but whom Don Roderick had reduced to
a choice between exile or slavery when he came to full power. Every one
knows how in a few weeks the whole peninsula fell before the invaders.
Toledo fell after the battle of Guadalete, where even the Bishop of
Seville fought on their side, and Roderick was lastingly numbered among
the missing, and was no doubt killed, as nothing has since been heard of
him.
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