Enough has been said to show that, amid the tumult of Gothic supremacy in Spain, literature was pursued—though not by Goths—with results which, if not splendid, are at least unmatched in other Western lands. Doubtless in Spain, as elsewhere, much curious learning and insolent ignorance throve jowl by jowl. Like enough, some Spanish St. Ouen wrote down Homer, Menander, and Virgil as three plain blackguards; like enough, the Spanish biographer of some local St. Bavo confounded Tityrus with Virgil, and declared that Pisistratus' Athenian contemporaries spoke habitually in Latin. The conceit of ignorance is a thing eternal. Withal, from the age of Prudentius onward, literature was sustained in one or other shape. For a century after Tarik's landing there is a pause, unbroken save for the _Chronicle_ of the anonymous Córdoban, too rashly identified as Isidore Pacensis. The intellectual revival appears, not among the Arabs, but among the Jews of Córdoba and Toledo; this last the immemorial home of magic where the devil was reputed to catch his own shadow. It was a devout belief that clerks went to Paris to study "the liberal arts," whereas in Toledo they mastered demonology and forgot their morals. Córdoba's fame, as the world's fine flower, crossed the German Rhine, and even reached the cloister of Roswitha, a nun who dabbled in Latin comedies. The achievements of Spanish Jews and Spanish Arabs call for separate treatises. Here it must suffice to say that the roll contains names mighty as that of the Jewish poet and philosopher Ibn Gebirol or Avicebron (d. ? 1070), whom Duns Scotus acknowledges as his master; and that of Judah ben Samuel the Levite (b. 1086), whom Heine celebrates in the _Romanzero_: "_Rein und wahrhaft, sonder Makel War sein Lied, wie seine Seele._" In one sense, if we choose to fasten on his favourite trick of closing a Hebrew stanza with a romance line, Judah ben Samuel the Levite may be accounted the earliest of known experimentalists in Spanish verse; and an Arab poet of Spanish descent, Ibn Hazm, anticipated the Catalan, Auzías March, by founding a school of poetry, at once mystic and amorous.