In the first period of this long contest the Arabs carried learning and the arts to a degree of cultivation far beyond any thing known in the Christian parts of Spain. Those wild enthusiasts learned, on the European soil, to estimate the value of civilized life with a rapidity as astonishing as that which distinguished the social improvement of their brethren, whom they had left behind in Asia, under the government of the Caliphs. Before the era of Mahomet, their language had been cultivated and adapted to poetry and eloquence, according to the laws of oriental taste. In Spain, it soon acquired, even among the conquered Christians, the superiority over the barbarous _Romance_, or dialect of the country, which was then governed by no rule: for in the eighth century, when the Moors penetrated into Spain, the Visigoths, who had been masters of the territory since the fifth century, were not yet completely intermixed by matrimonial alliances with the _Provincials_, or descendants of the Roman subjects; and the new national language, which had grown out of a corrupt latin, was still the sport of accident. The conquered Christians, in the provinces under Moorish dominion, soon forgot their Romance. They became, indeed, so habituated to the Arabic, that, according to the testimony of a bishop of Cordova, who lived in the ninth century, out of a thousand Spanish Christians, scarcely one was to be found capable of repeating the latin forms of prayer, while many could express themselves in Arabic with rhetorical elegance, and compose Arabic verses.[5] But the Christians who had preserved their independence, descending from the mountains of the Asturias, began to repel the invaders, and in proportion as they extended their conquests, a wider field was opened for the Spanish tongue. It remained, nevertheless, long barren and rude, and was destined to receive many additions from the rich and elegant Arabic, before it attained the copiousness requisite for the wants even of common life.