Page:History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic Vol. II.djvu/279

EXPEDITION OF CHARLES VIII. 255 vorable to that degree of personal security and chapter tranquillity indispensable to great proficiency in the '. — higher arts of civilization. It was equally repug- nant to the principle of patriotism, so essential to national independence, but which must have op- erated feebly among a people, whose sympathies, instead of being concentrated on the state, were claimed by a hundred masters, as was the case in every feudal community. The conviction of this reconciled the nation to the transfer of authority into other hands ; not those of the people, indeed, who were too ignorant, and too long accustomed to a subordinate, dependent situation, to admit of it, — but into the hands of the sovereign. It was not until three centuries more had elapsed, that the condition of the great mass of the people was to be so far improved, as to qualify them for asserting and maintaining the political consideration which of right belongs to them. In whatever degree public opinion and the pro- character , . . of reigning gress of events might favor the transition of power sovereigns from the aristocracy to the monarch, it is obvious that much would depend on his personal character ; since the advantages of his station alone made him by no means a match for the combined forces of his great nobility. The remarkable adaptation of the characters of the principal sovereigns of Europe to this exigency, in the latter half of the fifteenth cen- tury, would seem to have something providential in it. Henry the Seventh of England, Louis the Eleventh of France, Ferdinand of Naples, John the Second of Aragon, and his son Ferdinand, and John