A NEW, but old world, a sudden vision of the ORIENT, rose on the sight, when we reached the city of CORDOVA. Never did I enter a city that filled me with a deeper sense of the transient, temporal, and fleeting nature of all things material. It is not in ruins. It shows no tokens of decay to the coming traveller. A cleaner city is not in the world. It was the first city in Europe whose streets were paved, and the traditional habits of the people are so well preserved, that although it was a thousand years ago (in 850, under Abdurhaman) that this work was done, it has been done again and again, and the stones in the streets are kept as clean as the floor of a house. The Guadalquiver flows gently by the side of it, and under the shade-trees planted on its banks the idle and the fashionable have their favorite lounge and promenade. The bridge over this widely famed river was first built by Octavius Cæsar and rebuilt by the Moors. Standing on sixteen arches, it is a striking monument of two departed dynasties and forms of civilization. The city itself was great before Christ came into the world, and Julius Cæsar writes of it as it was in his day, when his armies swept over Spain. In the civil wars of Rome, Cordova declared for Pompey, and then Cæsar put 28,000 of its inhabitants to the sword. After the Moors came over from Africa, and, in the battle of Guadalete, struck down the power of the Goths, this city was governed by the Caliph of Damascus, until it became independent and the capital of Moorish Spain. Then began its career of glory. In the tenth century it had 300,000 inhabitants (now 40,000), and for these devout and cleanly and hospitable and learned Mussulmans there were six hundred mosques, and nine hundred baths, and six hundred inns, and eight hundred schools, and a library of 600,000 volumes.