Their high chivalry, added to their moderation after victory, would have divested even war of much of its barbarism, had they had to do with a race less impenetrable, and more susceptible of polish than were the iron legions of their Gothic antagonists. The persevering and repeated acts of treachery practised by these, at last drew their civilized adversaries, forcibly into the commission of acts of a similar nature--it being frequently necessary in self-defence to adopt the same weapons as one's enemy. When firmly settled in Spain, the Arabs no longer appear to have taken the field with a view to conquest. Abderahman the First, Almansor, and other conquerors, returned from their victories to repose in their capital; contenting themselves with founding schools and hospitals to commemorate their successes, without making them instrumental to the increase of their domination. After this time campaigns seem frequently to have been undertaken from motives of emulation, and for the purpose of affording them opportunities for a display of their prowess, and giving vent to their military ardour. They considered an irruption on the hostile territory, or an attack on a town, in the light of a tournament. The Christians, on the contrary, fought with a view to exterminate, and without ever losing sight of their main object--the expulsion of the Arabs and Moors from the Peninsula. It was thus that they ultimately succeeded--a result they probably would not have attained, had the Moorish leaders been actuated by similar views, and displayed less forbearance. Much of the misapprehension which exists in Europe respecting this race is attributable to the exaggerations of writers; much more to the absence of reflection in readers, and to the almost universal practice of bringing every act related of personages inhabiting remote and half-known climes, to the test of the only customs and manners with which we are familiar, and which we consider, for no other reason, superior to all others--making no allowance for difference of education, climate, tradition, race. An European, subjected to a similar process of criticism, on the part of an inhabitant of the East, would certainly not recognise his own portrait--a new disposition of light bearing upon peculiarities, the existence of which had hitherto been unsuspected by their owner; and he would manifest a surprise as unfeigned, as a Frenchman once expressed in my hearing, on finding himself in a situation almost parallel. Conversing on the subject of a play, acted in Paris, in which an Englishman cut a ridiculous figure--a lady present remarked, that, no doubt, in the London theatres the French were not spared; upon which the Frenchman I allude to--a person possessed of superior intelligence--exclaimed: "How could that be, since there was nothing about a Frenchman that could be laughed at?"