in
1534.

Cardinal Ximenes seems to have retaliated a little on the Saracens; for
at the taking of Granada, he condemned to the flames five thousand
Korans.

The following anecdote respecting a Spanish missal, called St.
Isidore's, is not incurious; hard fighting saved it from destruction. In
the Moorish wars, all these missals had been destroyed, excepting those
in the city of Toledo. There, in six churches, the Christians were
allowed the free exercise of their religion. When the Moors were
expelled several centuries afterwards from Toledo, Alphonsus the Sixth
ordered the Roman missal to be used in those churches; but the people of
Toledo insisted on having their own, as revised by St. Isidore. It
seemed to them that Alphonsus was more tyrannical than the Turks. The
contest between the Roman and the Toletan missals came to that height,
that at length it was determined to decide their fate by single combat;
the champion of the Toletan missal felled by one blow the knight of the
Roman missal. Alphonsus still considered this battle as merely the
effect of the heavy arm of the doughty Toletan, and ordered a fast to be
proclaimed, and a great fire to be prepared, into which, after his
majesty and the people had joined in prayer for heavenly assistance in
this ordeal, both the rivals (not the men, but the missals) were thrown
into the flames--again St. Isidore's missal triumphed, and this iron
book was then allowed to be orthodox by Alphonsus, and the good people
of Toledo were allowed to say their prayers as they had long been used
to do. However, the copies of this missal at length became very scarce;
for now, when no one opposed the reading of St. Isidore's missal, none
cared to use it. Cardinal Ximenes found it so difficult to obtain a
copy, that he printed a large impression, and built a chapel,
consecrated to St. Isidore, that this service might be daily chaunted as
it had been by the ancient Christians.

The works of the ancients were frequently destroyed at the instigation
of the monks. They appear sometimes to have mutilated them, for passages
have not come down to us, which once evidently existed; and occasionally
their interpolations and other forgeries formed a destruction in a new
shape, by additions to the originals. They were indefatigable in erasing
the best works of the most eminent Greek and Latin authors, in order to
transcribe their ridiculous lives of saints on the obliterated vellum.
One of the bo