Page:History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic Vol. I.djvu/455

THE SPANISH ARABS. 311 A decided effect has been produced on the chapter vin. romantic literature of Europe by those tales of fairy — enchantment, so characteristic of oriental genius, and in which it seems to have revelled with un- controlled delight. These tales, which furnished the principal diversion of the East, were imported by the Saracens into Spain ; and we find the mon- archs of Cordova solacing their leisure hours with listening to their rawis, or novelists, who sang to them " Of ladye-love and war, romance, and knightly worth." 5° The same spirit, penetrating into France, stimu- lated the more sluggish inventions of the trouvere, and, at a later and more polished period, called forth the imperishable creations of the Italian muse. ^^ It is unfortunate for the Arabians, that their liter- circum- stances pre- ature should be locked up in a character and idiom (htiv'rlpMa- so difficult of access to European scholars. Their guidillas ; and in the Preface to his History, he has ventured on the bold assertion, that the Castilian owes so much of its vocabulary to the Arabic, that it may be almost accounted a dialect of the latter. Conde's criticisms, however, must be quoted with reserve. His habit- ual studies had given him such a keen relish for oriental literature, that he was, in a manner, denatu- ralized from his own. 50 Byron's beautiful line may seem almost a version of Conde's Spanish text, " sucesos de armas y de amores con muy estraiios lances y en elegante estilo." — Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. i. P . 457. 51 Sismondi, in his Litt6rature du Midi (tom. i. pp. 267 et seq.), and more fully in his R^publiques Italiennes (tom. xvi. pp. 448 et seq.), derives the jealousy of the sex, the ideas of honor, and the deadly spirit of revenge, which dis- tinguished the southern nations of Europe in the fifteenth and six- teenth centuries, from the Ara- bians. Whatever be thought of the jealousy of the sex, it might have been supposed, that the prin- ciples of honor and the spirit of revenge might, without seeking further, find abundant precedent in the feudal habits and institutions of our European ancestors.