of even more novel and startling character. The unbroken intercourse with the Moslem principalities of the Peninsula had introduced into a country, whose people might, in some degree, justly claim consanguinity with the Saracens of Andalusia, the arts, the philosophy, and the erudition which had long embellished the accomplished courts of the Western Khalifate. Hence arose the popularity of the works of Averroes, and the general familiarity with the pantheistic ideas of Indian origin, subsequently adopted by the heretical sects which, from time to time, sprang up to vex the Papal orthodoxy of Europe. With their importation into France, the doctrines of the Arab philosophers were invested with a far broader significance than had ever been claimed by those who first inculcated their truths. The gay ballads of the South assumed a greater license of sentiment and language than their prototypes, whose freedom had provoked the censure of the Mohammedan society of the Guadalquivir, little inclined to displays of prudish morality. It was from such beginnings that were derived the suggestions of those memorable religious revolutions which, headed by Wyclif in England, Huss in Bohemia, and Luther in Germany, in defiance of the tremendous power of the Vatican, impressed an indelible seal upon the character and belief of so large a portion of the inhabitants of the civilized globe. The influence that Troubadour and Trouvère--poets and minstrels--during their incessant wanderings exerted upon the provincial dialects in which their productions were composed, and the extensive distribution of the latter, did more than all else to form and perfect the language of France. It was the same in Italy. That country also indirectly owes the sweet and musical accents of its graceful idiom, equally adapted to the descriptions of the historian, the representations of the dramatist, and the melodious versification of the poet, to a race foreign in all its characteristics and traditions to that quarter of the world where it exercised its greatest power. As with poetry, so it was with other manifestations of genius. Much of the architecture of Southern Europe, and especially those buildings devoted to religious worship, present unmistakable evidences of their Moorish origin; and thus the law of Mohammed, while it failed to retain its dominion over the minds of men, was enabled to perpetuate the memory of the arts, which it promoted in the construction of magnificent and imposing edifices raised for the celebration of the rites of another and an inimical religion. In a thousand ways, the march of intellectual improvement, suggested by the presence and example of Moslem skill and learning, was accelerated in the provinces of the South of France. The active minds of the inhabitants of the valley of the Rhone devoured with eagerness the extravagant tales of Moorish fiction, and their curiosity was stimulated by the study of the