of the statesmanlike measures inaugurated by their forefathers. The nobles and the clergy, inflamed with mutual animosity, suspicious of their partisans, and arrayed against each other, were engaged in a mortal struggle for superiority. The Jews, indulged and persecuted by turns, lived in a continual state of apprehension and despair. All the salutary restraints of religion were apparently removed; the Church was regarded as a convenient instrument for the attainment of political power; the priesthood were devoted to the practice of nameless vices; the people to indiscriminate libertinage. A large body of slaves, who, under the lash of brutal masters, still preserved the traditions of liberty, were ripe for revolt, and longed for the day of their deliverance. A disastrous famine, followed by its usual successor the pestilence, and whose effects were still apparent in untilled fields and deserted hamlets, had contributed to increase the popular suffering and discontent. Fortified on one side against the incursions of the Franks by the natural rampart of the Pyrenees, and isolated on the others by the Mediterranean and the ocean, the inhabitants of the Peninsula, in the enjoyment of a salubrious climate and fruitful soil, rested in fancied security, and had long since laid aside the armor whose weight had become oppressive, and abandoned those warlike exercises whose preservation was their only safeguard. Incited by a spirit of desperation which considered neither the consequences of his acts nor the means by which they were to be accomplished, Count Julian sought the presence of Musa. He found the Moslem general at Kairoan, which had been selected as the seat of the viceregal government of Western Africa. The intrepid character of his visitor was not unknown to the great Arab soldier whose designs upon Ceuta had been twice frustrated, by the valiant Greek, after the employment of all the resources at the command of the Khalif, and Count Julian was received with every token of honor and respect. Unfolding his project, he descanted long and earnestly upon the riches of the Gothic monarchy and the facility of its conquest. He explained the feuds and bitter feelings engendered by disappointed ambition, by religious persecution, by the seizure of hereditary estates, by the sufferings of wounded pride. He expatiated on the sense of injury experienced by the advocates of hereditary descent, who considered the reigning monarch of foreign lineage and inferior rank that had justly incurred the odium of usurpation. He portrayed in glowing terms the innumerable attractions of the country, its productive valleys, its crystal streams, the medicinal value of its herbs and plants to which magical virtues were attributed by popular report, its mines, its fisheries, the precious spoil which awaited the hand of the invader, the transcendent beauty of its women. He described the effeminate character of the inhabitants, enervated by idleness,