had their schools of architecture and art: where were the Arabs or Moors taught? Their peculiar style, so far as I know,’ he added, ‘rose rapidly, almost at a bound. We can scarcely discover any trace of progress from rude beginnings, as in the Greek architecture. This has ever been to me a most interesting and mysterious subject.’” Mr. Nelson evidently thought and read not a little upon Moorish architecture, but, like many another student, without arriving at any satisfactory result. “How the wild tribes who came up from the desert of Arabia, and occupied in succession the great cities of Syria, Egypt, northern Africa, and lastly of Spain, attained to so much taste and splendour in architecture seems a mystery.” Then he remarked: “When Arab rule ceased, architecture declined in all those places, and has never been revived.” He remarked more than once: “Were not the Arabs, especially those in the great cities of the East, a literary people? Had they not a multitude of books on the various departments of science and philosophy? Was not their language capable of expressing the most profound thoughts? Did it not give evidence of high cultivation?” The impress of their intellectual influence, still manifest throughout Christian Spain, attracted his notice on all hands, and especially in its ecclesiastical architecture. The Moorish artists, he observed, had furnished the models on which, after the conquest of Granada, the architects of Christian Spain wrought. When conversing about the celebrated Cathedral of Cordova, he said: “That appears to me to be one of the most remarkable buildings in Spain, or perhaps in the world. It seems to be of purely Arab architecture: in all respects like a mosque, and adapted originally for the Moslem worship. Its internal decoration too is Arab, with the flaring stripes on the walls of red and white paint, and the imitation of red and white stones in the circular arches;” and he observed that he had seen rude painting exactly resembling it in several of the private houses and on the outside of the mosques in Damascus and Cairo. Nothing different from ordinary usage, either in building or internal decoration, escaped his keen observation; but his ignorance of the language precluded him from that familiar intercourse with the people which, when opportunity offered, he ordinarily turned to such good account.