here for the mastery of the peninsula.
By degrees I fell into a course of musing
upon the singular fortunes of the Arabian
or Morisco-Spaniards, whose whole exist-
ence is as a tale that is told, and certainly
forms one of the most anomalous yet
splendid episodes in history. Potent and
durable as was their dominion, we scarcely
know how to call them. They were a
nation without a legitimate country or 10
name. A remote wave of the great Ara-
bian inundation, cast upon the shores of
Europe, they seem to have all the impetus
of the first rush of the torrent.
career of conquest, from the rock of Gib- 15
raltar to the cliffs of the Pyrenees, was
as rapid and brilliant as the Moslem vic-
tories of Syria and Egypt. Nay, had
they not been checked on the plains of
Tours, all France, all Europe, might have 20
been overrun with the same facility as
the empires of the East, and the Crescent
at this day have glittered on the fanes of
Paris and London.

Their

Repelled within the limits of the Pyre- 25 nees, the mixed hordes of Asia and Africa, that formed this great irruption, gave up the Moslem principle of conquest, and sought to establish in Spain a peaceful and permanent dominion. As conquer- 30 ors, their heroism was only equaled by their moderation; and in both, for a time, they excelled the nations with whom they contended. Severed from their native homes, they loveď the land given them as 35 they supposed by Allah, and strove to embellish it with everything that could administer to the happiness of man. Laying the foundations of their power in a system of wise and equitable laws, dili- 40 gently cultivating the arts and sciences, and promoting agriculture, manufactures, and commerce, they gradually formed an empire unrivaled for its prosperity by any of the empires of Christendom; and dili- 45 gently drawing round them the graces and refinements which marked the Arabian empire in the East, at the time of its greatest civilization, they diffused the

treasured lore of antiquity; the lovers of the gay science resorted to Cordova and Granada to imbibe the poetry and music of the East; and the steel-clad warriors 5 of the North hastened thither to accomplish themselves in the graceful exercises and courteous usages of chivalry.

If the Moslem monuments in Spain, if the Mosque of Cordova, the Alcazar of Seville, and the Alhambra of Granada, still bear inscriptions fondly boasting of the power and permanency of their dominion, can the boast be derided as arrogant and vain? Generation after generation, century after century, passed away, and still they maintained possession of the land. A period elapsed longer than that which has passed since England was subjugated by the Norman Conqueror, and the descendants of Musa and Taric might as little anticipate being driven into exile across the same straits, traversed by their triumphant ancestors, as the descendants of Rollo and William, and their veteran peers, may dream of being driven back to the shores of Normandy.

With all this, however, the Moslem empire in Spain was but a brilliant exotic, that took no permanent root in the soil it embellished. Severed from all their neighbors in the West by impassable barriers of faith and manners, and separated by seas and deserts from their kindred of the East, the Morisco-Spaniards were an isolated people. Their whole existence

was

a prolonged though gallant and chivalric struggle for a foothold in a usurped land.

They were the outposts and frontiers of Islamism. Then Peninsula was the great battle-ground where the Gothic conquerors of the North and the Moslem conquerors of the East met and strove for mastery; and the fiery courage of the Arab was at length subdued by the obstinate and persevering valor of the Goth.

Never was the annihilation of a people more complete than that of the Morisco-Spaniards. Where are they? Ask

light of Oriental knowledge through the 50 the shores of Barbary and its desert

western regions of benighted Europe.

The cities of Arabian Spain became the resort of Christian artisans, to instruct themselves in the useful arts. The uni

places. The exiled remnant of their once powerful empire disappeared among the barbarians of Africa, and ceased to be a nation. They have not even left a

versities of Toledo, Cordova, Seville, and 55 distinct name behind them, though for

Granada were sought by the pale student from other lands to acquaint himself with the sciences of the Arabs and the

nearly eight centuries they were a distinct people. The home of their adoption, and of their occupation for ages, refuses to

acknowledge them, except as invaders and usurpers. A few broken monuments are all that remain to bear witness to their power and dominion, as solitary rocks, left far in the interior, bear testimony to the extent of some vast inundation. Such is the Alhambra :- a Moslem pile in the midst of a Christian land; an Oriental palace amidst the Gothic edifices of the West; an elegant memento of a brave, in- 10 telligent, and graceful people, who conquered, ruled, flourished, and passed away. From The Alhambra, 1832.

or

SPANISH ROMANCE

TO THE EDITOR OF THE KNICKERBOCKER

SIR: I have already given you a legend 20

principal business of man, and was carried to the highest pitch of romantic chivalry. The original ground of hostility, a difference of faith, gradually lost 5 its rancor. Neighboring states, of opposite creeds, were occasionally linked together in alliances, offensive and defensive; so that the cross and crescent were to be seen side by side fighting against some common enemy. In times of peace, too, the noble youth of either faith resorted to the same cities, Christian or Moslem, to school themselves in military science. Even in the temporary truces 15 of sanguinary ars, the warriors who had recently striven together in the deadly conflicts of the field, laid aside their animosity, met at tournaments, jousts, and other military festivities, and exchanged the courtesies of gentle and generous spirits. Thus the opposite races became frequently mingled together in peaceful intercourse, or if any rivalry took place, it was in those high courtesies and nobler acts which bespeak the accomplished cavalier. Warriors of opposite creeds became ambitious of transcending each other in magnanimity as well as valor. Indeed, the chivalric virtues were refined upon to a degree sometimes fastidious and constrained; but at other times, inexpressibly noble and affecting. The annals of the times teem with illustrious instances of highwrought courtesy, romantic generosity, lofty disinterestedness, and punctilious honor, that warm the very soul to read them. These have furnished themes for national plays and poems, or have been celebrated in those all-pervading ballads which are as the life-breath of the people, and thus have continued to exercise an influence on the national character which centuries of vicissitude and decline have not been able to destroy; so that, with all their faults, and they are many, the Spaniards, even at the present day, are on many points the most high-minded and proud-spirited people of Europe. It is true, the romance of feeling derived from

two drawn from ancient Spanish sources, and may occasionally give you a few more. I love these old Spanish themes, especially when they have a dash of the Morisco in them, and treat of the 25 times when the Moslems maintained a foot-hold in the peninsula. They have a high, spicy, oriental flavor, not to be found in any other themes that are merely European. In fact, Spain is a country 30 that stands alone in the midst of Europe; severed in habits, manners, and modes of thinking, from all its continental neighbors. It is a romantic country; but its romance has none of the sentimentality 35 of modern European romance; it is chiefly derived from the brilliant regions of the East, and from the high-minded school of Saracenic chivalry.

The Arab invasion and conquest brought 40 a higher civilization and a nobler style of thinking into Gothic Spain. The Arabs were a quick-witted, sagacious, proud-spirited, and poetical people, and were imbued with oriental science and 45 literature. Wherever they established a seat of power, it became a rallying place for the learned and ingenious; and they softened and refined the people whom they conquered. Bv degrees, occupancy 50 the sources I have mentioned, has, like

seemed to give them a hereditary right
to their foothold in the land; they ceased
to be looked upon as invaders, and were
regarded as rival neighbors. The penin-
sula, broken up into a variety of states, 55
both Christian and Moslem, became for
centuries a great campaigning ground,
where the art of war seemed to be the

all other romance, its affectations and extremes. It renders the Spaniard at times pompous and grandiloquent; prone to carry the pundonor,' or point of honor, beyond the bounds of sober sense and sound morality; disposed, in the midst of poverty, to affect the 'grande caballero,' and to look down with sovereign disdain

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER (1789-1851)

At the close of the Revolutionary war the father of J. Fenimore Cooper joined the westward movement of the time and took up a vast tract of land on what was then the wild frontier at the headwaters of the Susquehanna in the state of New York. Here on the shores of Lake Otsego he built in 1786 a manor house in southern plantation fashion, the center of a little selfdependent community, and here he ruled with a kind of feudal authority for the rest of his life. It was no common home: distinguished visitors frequented it. The French statesman Tallyrand made it his headquarters for a time, and many prominent British travelers at one time or another were entertained under its hospitable roof. It was the center of a picturesque area of society. Indians and frontiersmen used it as a trading post, and every element of the wild life of the border surged constantly about it. A marvelous place it was for an impressionable boy, a unique training school for a young novelist. The boy Cooper came at the moment when the old régime was passing away and he saw the full glory of the primitive forests and the wild life that surged about the lakes. He accompanied trappers and Indians on trips into the woods and he listened night after night to their savage tales.

His father, however, had ambitious plans for the boy. He had him tutored carefully in Latin and Greek and had him ready at thirteen to enter Yale. The lad was too young to send to college. He wanted to play, and his free-aired childhood had made him impatient of restraint. Before he was sixteen the college had dismissed him for his pranks. The sea had laid hold of his imagination: he wanted to join the navy. Gaining his father's consent, he qualified by a year in a sailing vessel before the mast and in 1808 became a regular midshipman in the United States service. He served until 1811 when he was given an honorable discharge. He married at twenty-one and the rest of his life he spent unadventurously in the quiet of his peaceful home either in New York or in quarters abroad.

His literary career began in 1820 with Precaution, a dull domestic novel which he had written almost by accident as a protest against the insufferable English fiction that he had been compelled to read. The next year he produced The Spy with material and scenes with which he was familiar and all at once he awoke to find himself famous. The Pioneers, 1823, and The Pilot, 1823, especially the latter, established him as a novelist, and when in 1826, after issuing The Last of the Mohicans, he sailed with his family for Europe, his popularity had reached the highest point. During the seven years he spent in Europe he wrote continuously: tales of the sea, Indian stories, historical romances, European historical novels after the pattern of Scott, and defenses of his native land. Then, returning to America, he became engaged in bitter controversy with his countrymen. He wrote novels criticising American manners as contrasted with European manners, he prepared a history of the United States navy which made him enemies, and he began to prosecute vigorously all critics and papers which in his estimation libeled him. Little that he wrote during his last years ranks with his best work. In his thirty-two novels there is much that need not be read. One may ignore almost two-thirds of his entire set of books. Among his best stories are the five Leather-Stocking Tales: The Deerslayer, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder. The Pioneers, and The Prairie: five sea tales: The Pilot, The Red Rover, The Water Witch, The Two Admirals, and Wing and Wing; and two or three others, notably The Spy. Lionel Lincoln, and Satanstoe. The best life of Cooper is Lounsbury's in The American Men of Letters Series.