conquests, and of constant accessions from Oriental art, can be clearly traced therein. But in Spain there is perhaps a juster proportion, a greater variety and richness of ornamentation and colour than is to be found elsewhere. The grandest of Moorish buildings in Spain is undoubtedly one of the earliest, the great Mosque of Cordova, with its forest of 1200 columns, its fifty-seven naves, nineteen gates, and upwards of 4000 lamps, recalling the impression produced by the Egyptian hall of Karnac at Thebes,--an impression so vivid that even the iconoclast emperor, Charles V., whose own palace mars the beauty of the Alhambra, rebuked the Archbishop of Cordova for destroying what he never could replace, when he cut away some of the columns to make room for a Christian chapel. Not less beautiful in their graceful proportions than the Campanile of Italy are the minarets and towers of Arabian art in Spain, as the Giralda of Seville and others; even the quaintness of the leaning tower of Pisa finds its counterpart in the leaning tower of Saragossa. The Moorish gates of Toledo, of Seville, and the Alcazar of Segovia show how castellated strength may be wedded to artistic elegance; but the most perfect union at once of fortress and of palace is to be found in the noble group of buildings known as the Alhambra, on the hill of Granada. Though trembling on the verge of debasement when the severer forms of Arabian art were beginning to admit the representation of animal shapes, whose rude sculpture forms a contrast to the exquisite correctness of the alphabetic and geometrical designs which ornament the walls, these buildings may yet be regarded as marking the culmination of Moorish art. The fertility of decorative design, the exquisite use made of Arabic lettering, and the simple yet subtle forms of geometrical interlacing--apparently most fantastic, yet really ever subordinated to a just proportion with the whole--these are a theme of wondering admiration to every student. A whole grammar of ornament might be illustrated by examples taken from these buildings alone. The architecture of the houses of the Moorish aristocracy which still remain in Seville, Granada, Toledo, and Saragossa is wonderfully adapted both to the necessities of the climate and to domestic ornament. In the more northern examples the open galleries, in the more southern the flat roof, of the apartments surrounding the inner quadrangle make a delightful resort in the cool of the day; while the court or _patio_ itself, with its fountains and shade, its flowers and creepers and odoriferous shrubs, its mingled play of light and colour, through which the delicate grace of ornament is seen uninjured by the dust and contact with the outside traffic, appears to the northern tourist almost like one of the fairy homes of which his ancestors dreamed, and which have been described to him in many a legend, as a thing too lovely to be gazed upon by mortal eyes unless unsealed.