e door for further
researches; and he was followed in the same path by Don Faustino de
Borbon, whose works, valuable rather from the erudition which they
display than from their judgment or critical acumen, have now become
extremely scarce--and next by Don Antonio Jose Conde, one of the most
zealous and laborious, if not the most accurate, of Spanish
orientalists. His "History of the Domination of the Arabs and Moors in
Spain," has been generally regarded as of high authority, and is in
truth the first work on the subject drawn wholly from Arab sources;
but it receives summary condemnation from Senor de Gayangos, for "the
uncouth arrangement of the materials, the entire want of critical or
explanatory notes, the unaccountable neglect to cite authorities, the
numerous repetitions, blunders, and contradictions." These charges are
certainly not without foundation; but they are in some measure
accounted for by the trouble and penury in which the author's last
years were spent, and the unfinished state in which the work was left
at his death in 1820.

[4] The Almoravide and Almohade princes, who ruled both in
Spain and Africa, often inserted a clause in their treaties
with the Christians for the restoration of the libraries
captured in the towns taken from the Moslems; and Ibn Khaldun
mentions, that Yakob Al-mansor destined a college at Fez for
the reception of the books thus recovered.

An authentic and comprehensive view of the Arab period, as described
by their own writers, was therefore still a desideratum in European
literature, which the publication before us may be considered as the
first step towards supplying. The work of Al-Makkari, which has been
taken as a text-book, is not so much an original history as a
collection of extracts, sometimes abridged, and sometimes transcribed
in full, from more ancient historians; and frequently giving two or
three versions of the same event from different authorities--so that,
though it can claim but little merit as a composition, it is of
extreme value as a repository of fragments of authors in many cases
now lost; and further, as the only "uninterrupted narrative of the
conquests, wars, and settlements of the Spanish Moslems, from their
first invasion of the Peninsula to their final expulsion." In the
arrangement of his materials, the translator has departed
considerably, and with advantage, from the original; giving the
historical books in the form o