A ballad literature, rising to the level of the humbler epics, and a truly home-grown drama, are the self-evolved, indigenous elements of Spanish literature. Their material influences are to be found in the histories of America, the Indies, the Philippines, Micronesia, Italy, and the Mediterranean Islands.
Portugal is Spain with a difference. More purely Iberic, and less Phœnician, from the first, it was also less Roman, less Arab, and very slightly Gothic. In Africa and India its influence has been greater, in America somewhat less than that of Spain. The extent to which the physical and moral characteristics of the Galicians and Estremadurans are intermediate and transitional, I am unable to state.
A refinement upon the doctrine of the Keltæ having been Iberian, and of the Celtiberi having been no Kelts at all, in the usual sense of the term, will be found when we come to the ethnology of Ireland. It consists in the possibility of one or both having been _Gaels_--Kelts, it is true, but not Kelts in the sense given to the word by the ancients.
FRANCE.--IBERIAN BLOOD IN GAUL AS WELL AS THE SPANISH PENINSULA.--IBERIANS OF GASCONY, ETC.--LIGURIANS.--HOW FAR KELTIC.--BODENCUS.--INTERMIXTURE.--ROMAN, GERMAN, ARAB.--ALSATIA.--LORRAINE.--FRANCHE-COMTÉ.--BURGUNDY, SOUTHERN, WESTERN, AND NORTHERN FRANCE.--CHARACTER OF THE KELTS.--THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE.--BELGIUM.--ITS ELEMENTS.--KELTIC, GERMAN, AND ROMAN.--SWITZERLAND.--HELVETIA.--ROMANCE, FRENCH, AND GERMAN LANGUAGES.
It is convenient to take the ethnology of France next in order to that of Spain, because we have already seen that, when we examine the earliest populations of the two countries we shall find that the _Iberic_ stock was common to the two. Although I find no Gauls in Iberia, the Iberians in ancient Gaul were numerous; indeed, they occur in Gascony and Bearn at the present moment.
The predominant stock, however, of Gallia, as is well-known, is the _Keltic_, still existing, along with its ancient language, and other characteristics in Brittany.
The Iberians belonged chiefly, though not wholly and exclusively, to _Aquitania_. In the reign of Augustus this term denoted a _political_, in that of Julius Cæsar, an _ethnological_ area. The _province_ reached from the Pyrenees to the Loire; the _Aquitania_ of the true _Aquitani_ from the Pyrenees to the Garonne.