[28] Mr. Irving says of his "chronicler": "In constructing my chronicle, I adopted the fiction of a Spanish monk as a chronicler. Fray Antonio Agapida was intended as a personification of the monkish zealots who hovered about the sovereigns in their campaigns, marring the chivalry of the camp by the bigotry of the cloister, and chronicling in rapturous strains every act of intolerance towards the Moors." (Introduction to the revised edition of the Conquest of Granada, 1850.) [29] Washington Irving: Conquest of Granada, chap. xii. [30] Lockhart: Spanish Ballads. [31] Sir W. Stirling Maxwell: Don John of Austria, i. 115. [32] The Spaniards were never able to do justice to the rich soil of Andalusia. So little did the Crown think of the fertile country about Granada that in 1591 the royal domains there were sold, because they cost more than the Spaniards could make them yield! In the time of the Moors the same lands were gardens of almost tropical luxuriance. [33] Sir W. Stirling Maxwell: Don John of Austria, i. 126-8. End of Project Gutenberg's The Moors in Spain, by Stanley Lane-Poole