“Just then a torrent cross’d the flier’s course; The dangerous ford the kingly likeness tried, But the deep eddies whelm’d both man and horse, Swept like benighted peasant down the tide.” --SCOTT, _The Vision of Don Roderic_. The young Arab power was at the door of Spain before the degenerate Goths were half awake to their danger. They had hardly shaken off their slumbers before they were prisoners or fugitives from the house they had ruled for almost exactly three centuries. Roderic and his sixty thousand men fought madly for three days at Xeres near the junction of the Guadalete and Guadalquivir, but when the brave king himself lost courage and fled--if indeed he fled--the whole race took panic with him. The end of Roderic is lost in a tangle of fable and tradition. Scott has embalmed the legend as quoted above, and Southey in his poem, _The Last of the Goths_, has built him a splendid mausoleum; but all that history can say is that his crown and sceptre were found on the bank of the stream and that his kingdom was as completely disembodied as its empty emblems. And now, as Hume[b] says, “The purely Gothic element in Spain was withered up as if by fire.” [Sidenote: [711-755 A.D.]] The story of the Moslem conquest has been already told in the fifth chapter of the history of the Arabs, in the eighth volume of this work. To that the reader is referred for the details of the invasion. The original Spanish people who had been regarded by the Goths as an inferior race unworthy of marriage, though the restriction was withdrawn shortly before the Moslems came, and the Jews, treated by the Goths as a cursed pest whom it was a virtue to torment--both welcomed the new-comers. They were rewarded with a gentleness of tolerance and a growth of intellectuality and commerce that lead one to question if the Arab domination of Europe would have been indeed the horror it is usually imagined; and if the repulse Charles Martel gave the Saracens at Tours in 732 were really the benefit to civilisation that we are wont to imagine it. [Illustration: A MOHAMMEDAN CHIEF] The chapter on Arab civilisation in the eighth volume argues that the Arabians gave to Spain a glory and a culture of the most brilliant type, extending from the restoration of Greek letters to the awakening of modern science and commerce of the most splendid sort. When at length they were cast out of Spain, the reaction against them was itself the effort of an intolerant, tyrannous, and blood-thirsty religious system, which even in its triumph at the time of Ferdinand and Isabella distinguished itself by the greatest blot on human civilisation, the Inquisition, and by cruelties that spread zealously round the world to the enslavement and torture, often the annihilation of remote and innocent races.