Within the walls of this castle, covering an area of several acres, the successive Moorish kings erected palaces, and embellishing them according to their own tastes, joined walls and towers, and courts and fountains and gardens, until in process of time the great enclosure became filled with the edifices which this luxurious and extravagant race of monarchs desired for themselves, their wives and concubines, and the hosts of servants and dependants which such a style of life, in such a country, must demand. At this moment, the palace of the Russian emperor holds five thousand persons, all actually required to wait upon the Czar and his household and one another. In the Seraglio of the Sultan of Turkey 40,000 oxen were eaten yearly, and 400 sheep a day. An army would therefore be as easily lodged as the family of a Moorish king in the palace at Granada. What it was in the days of Abu-Abdallah, who has the traditional honor of having built the palace itself, or of Yusef I., who added lustre to its walls by his gorgeous decorations, we can form but a faint conception from what we see of it now that it is stripped of its purple and gold, and has nothing of its former splendors but the mouldering walls and shattered stairs and broken floors. The first prince who took up his abode in the Alhambra itself was Alhamar, from whom it has been by many supposed that the palace itself was named. He was a wise, gentle, and noble ruler, so widely differing from most of his race that he actually preferred peace to war; and, to make it possible for him to pursue without interruption his vast beneficent plans for the improvement of the condition of his people, he consented to pay an annual tribute to Ferdinand, King of Arragon. Alhamar constructed roads to the distant parts of his empire, which then reached to Gibraltar; he built colleges and hospitals; and the canals that carried waters far into the plains for irrigation were the work of this barbarian king. Under his reign the city rose to its zenith of splendor. The arts and sciences flourished as the vine and fig-tree in a genial soil. Wealth, learning, genius, taste, and chivalry lent their aid to heighten the attractions of this fair city. Yusef, one of his successors, added many buildings to those that he had left, and others were crowded into the arena in after reigns, so that for two hundred and fifty years it was growing in such magnificence and beauty, as the soft, languid, and effeminate tastes of a luxurious, debauched, and decaying race of irresponsible, licentious, and decaying monarchs, with a host of wives to prompt them to indulgence in every whim of fancy, could invent to add to the delights of their terrestrial paradise. What could be looked for as the result of such lives but the ruin of the empire. Kings had but short reigns, for intrigue, lust, ambition, and murder made one after another give place to a rival who sought his bed quite as much as his throne.