have required 400 camels. [26] Prescott's "Ferdinand and Isabella," Book I, chap., 8, Conde's "History of Spain," II., chap., 88. The subjects upon which these thousands upon thousands of volumes treat are so manifold, and the authors so numerous--the department of history, for instance, according to an Arabian author cited by D'Herbelot, could boast of 1,300 writers--that even a synoptical review of them would need more space and time than the scope of these discourses will allow, and so we dismiss them with the simple remark that such is their excellence, such the influence they exercised upon the literature of Europe that a careful perusal of the works still extant in the original or in translation will well repay the special student of any of the special branches of literature of which they treat. The poetry of that period, however, refuses to be dismissed. She bids us halt. She, the queen of literature, is not accustomed to such slight. She was born to rule, she brooks no opposition, and so we pause. And after we have held sweet converse with her minstrel bards, and after we have perused a number of the almost countless volumes devoted to winged words of music and to poetic fancy, we regret not, that she made us pause. No longer do we think her boast an idle one that Spain, during the period that extends from the eighth to the fifteenth century, can show a greater number of poets than all the other nations combined. We need not ask the reason why. Any one acquainted with the extraordinary richness of both the Hebrew and its kindred--the Arabic language--their natural cadence, which lends itself to verse, the ease which both languages afford in passing from prose to poetry, and with the bent of mind of both races, poetical, delighting in figurative speech, in metaphor and allegory and fable, in luxuriant imagery and fanciful romance, any one acquainted with their Oriental predilection for the fairer sex, which could only express itself in languishing idyls or passionate lyric sonnets, any one knowing all this, will not wonder at the vastness of the Jewish and Moorish poetic literature. The Moors excelled in what was then known as the art of "story telling." They had brought it with them from the East and the enchanting moonlight evenings of Andalusia, and the sequestered, fairy-like gardens, with their shady cypress trees, and their cascades, and their flowering shrubs, and their bowers of roses, and their crypt-like grottoes, all these tended to keep the love for their art alive. With them "this story telling," both in prose and poetry, took the place of theatrical representation. Those of you familiar with one of the many extant prose collections of stories such as "The Arabian Nights," can readily form an opinion of the great charm that branch of literature must have had in the original language for the Moorish people.