in the tenth century, is credited with nearly eleven hundred works on metaphysics, history, and medicine. Ibn-Hasen composed four hundred and fifty books on philosophy and jurisprudence. Another writer left behind him eighty thousand pages of closely written manuscript. It was no unusual circumstance for a dictionary or an encyclopædia to number fifty volumes. Commentaries on theology, religious tradition, and law were almost infinite in the extent and diversity of their topics. The historical productions of the Spanish Arabs were probably the most minute and voluminous ever published by any people, and their scrupulous fidelity to truth has been repeatedly established by the comparison of their descriptions with the architectural monuments which have descended to us, and by the corroborative evidence of distant and often hostile writers. The authors are usually deficient, however, in the application, and often even in the knowledge, of the canons of historical criticism; their love of the marvellous occasionally interferes with their judgment, and their descriptions, overloaded with florid rhetoric, belong rather to the province of the orator than to that of the accurate and discriminating historian. More than a thousand chroniclers have illustrated the annals of Moorish Spain. Their style, at once turgid and obscure, often renders their meaning unintelligible, while their text is overburdened with puerile anecdotes, Koranic allusions, and perplexing Oriental metaphors. Generations passed in another land, under conditions of extraordinary political and industrial activity, seemed powerless to eradicate or even to substantially modify the mental characteristics of a race bred amidst the solitude and dominated by the prejudices and the superstitions of the Asiatic Desert. The stubborn persistence of these traits is one of the most singular phases of its life and history. Its polity and its religious belief were foreign to, and irreconcilable with, those that prevailed elsewhere in Europe. Its customs, its language, its literature were all exotic. In works of imagination, the elegant fictions of the East, fascinating to the highest degree, and better adapted to the expanding intellect of man than the coarse and barbaric tales of Gothic origin, soon supplanted the latter, as the light and keen-edged scimetar had already driven out the clumsy broadsword of the followers of Roderick. The practical methods of thought founded upon the system of Aristotle everywhere obtained precedence over the unsubstantial and visionary theories of the Platonic school. In public assemblies, where men and women alike competed for the prize of literary superiority; in social intercourse, where the fair sex were accorded far more liberty than had ever been vouchsafed to the matrons and virgins of antiquity, or than is now enjoyed in the harems of the Orient, were developed and practised those amenities and graces