which played a grand rôle some five centuries ago, but that sort is too closely connected with those composing the poems on the Spanish Moors, and of them I shall speak later. It remains now to but enumerate the enigmas found in all popular literature, and the satiric sayings attributed to holy persons of the fifteenth century, who, for having been virtuous and having possessed the gift of miracles, were none the less men, and as such bore anger and spite. The most celebrated of all was Sidi Ahmed ben Yousuf, who was buried at Miliana. By reason of the axiom, "They lend but to the rich," they attributed to him all the satirical sayings which are heard in the villages and among the tribes of Algeria, of which, perhaps, he did pronounce some. Praises are rare:

  "He whom you see, wild and tall,
  Know him for a child of Algiers,"

  "Beni Menaur, son of the dispersed,
  Has many soldiers,
  And a false heart."

  "Some are going to call you Blida (little village),
  But I have called you Ourida (little rose)."

  "Cherchel is but shame,
  Avarice, and flight from society,
  His face is that of a sheep,
  His heart is the heart of a wolf;
  Be either sailor or forge worker,
  Or else leave the city."⁴²

  "He who stands there on a low hill
  All dressed in a small mantle,
  Holding in his hand a small stick
  And calling to sorrow, 'Come and find me,'
  Know him for a son of Medea."

  "Miliana; Error and evil renown,
  Of water and of wood,
  People are jealous of it,
  Women are Viziers there,
  And men the captives."

  "Ténès; built upon a dunghill,
  Its water is blood,
  Its air is poison,
  By the Eternal! Sidi Ahmed will not pass the night here,
  Get out of the house, O cat!"

  "People of Bon Speur,
  Women and men,
  That they throw into the sea."

  "From the Orient and Occident,
  I gathered the scamps,
  I brought them to Sidi Mohammed ben Djellal.
  There they escaped me,
  One part went to Morocco,
  And the rest went down into Eghrès."

        "Oran the depraved,
        I sold thee at a reasonable price;
        The Christians have come there,
        Until the day of the resurrection."

     "Tlemcen: Glory of the chevaliers;
     Her water, her air,
     And the way her women veil themselves
     Are found in no other land."

  "Tunis: Land of hypocrisy and deceit,
  In the day there is abundance of vagabonds,
  At night their number is multiplied,
  God grant that I be not buried in its soil."

Another no less celebrated in Morocco, Sidi Abdan Rahman el Medjidont, is, they say, the author of sentences in four verses, in which he curses the vices of his time and satirizes the tribes, and attacks the women with a bitterness worthy of Juvenal:

        "Morocco is the land of treason;
        Accursed be its habitants;
        They make guests sleep outside,
        And steal their provisions."⁴³

     "Deceptive women are deceivers ever,
     I hastened to escape them.
     They girdle themselves with vipers,
     And fasten their gowns with scorpions."

  "Let not thyself fall victim to a widow,
  Even if her cheeks are bouquets,
  For though you are the best of husbands,
  She will repeat ceaselessly, 'God, be merciful to the dead.'"

        "No river on the mountains,
        No warm nights in the winter,
        No women doing kind actions,
        No generous-hearted enemies."

The battle of the Guadalete, where sank the Visigoth empire, delivered Spain almost defenceless to the Arab and Berber conquest. There developed then a civilization and an intellectual culture far superior to those of the barbarous Christian refugees in the Asturias, where they led a rude and coarse life which but seasoned them for future struggles. Of their literary monuments, there remain to us but mediocre Latin chronicles. The court of the Omayades at Cordova saw a literature blossom which did not disappear even after the fall of the Khalifate. On the contrary, it seemed to regain a new vigor in the small states which surged up about the Iberian Peninsula. The Christians, under the domination of the Mussulmans, allowed themselves to be seduced by the Arabian literature. "They loved to read their poems and romances. They went to great expense and built immense libraries. They scarcely knew how to express themselves in Latin, but when it was necessary to write in Arabic, they found crowds of people who understood that language, wrote it with the greatest elegance, and composed poems even preferable in point of view to the art of the Arab poets themselves."⁴⁴

In spite of the complaints of fanatics like Euloge and Alvaro, the literary history of that time was filled with Christian names, either those of Spanish who had remained faithful to the ancient faith, or renegades, or children of renegades. By the side of the Arab names, like that of the Bishop Arib ben Said of Cordova, are found those of Ibn Guzman (Son of Guzman), Ibn el Goutya (son of Gothe), Ibn Loyon (son of Leon), Ibn er Roumaye (son of the Greek), Ibn Konbaret (son of Comparatus), Ibn Baschkoual (son of Paschal), and all have left a name among letters.

One magnificent period in literature unfolded itself in the eleventh century A.D., in the little courts of Seville, of Murcie, of Malaga, Valence, Toledo, and Badajos. The kings, like El Nis Sasim, El Mo'hadhid, El Mishamed, Hbn Razin, rank among the best poets, and even the women answered with talent to the verses which they inspired. They have preserved the names and the pieces of some of them: Aicha, Rhadia, Fatima, Maryam, Touna, and the Princess Ouallada. Greek antiquity has not left us more elegant verses, nor elegies more passionate, than these, of which but a small portion has been saved from forgetfulness in the anthologies of Hbn Khayan, Hbn el Abbar, Hbn Bassam de Turad-eddin, and Ibn el Khatib el Maggari. They needed the arrival of the Berbers to turn them into Almoran. Those Berbers hastened there from the middle of Sahara and the borders of Senegal to help the cause of Islamism against Spanish rule, as it was menaced through the victories of Alfonso of Castile. The result would have been to stifle those free manifestations of the literary art under a rigorous piety which was almost always but the thin varnish of hypocrisy.

To the Almoravides succeeded the Almohades coming from the Atlas of Morocco. To the Almohades, the Merias coming from Sahara in Algeria, but in dying out each of these dynasties left each time a little more ground under the hands of the Christians, who, since the time in Telage, when they were tracked into the caverns of Covadonga, had not ceased, in spite of ill fortune of all sorts, to follow the work of deliverance. It would have been accomplished centuries before if the internal struggle in Christian Spain in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had not accorded some years of respite to the kingdom which was being founded at Granada, and revived, although with less brilliancy, the splendor of the times before the twelfth century.

In the course of the long