Abassides, who mounted the throne in 750--and
who introduced a passionate love for poetry, science and art--until the
time of Al Mamoun, the Augustus of Arabia, there elapsed only one
hundred and fifty years, a rate of progress in the development of
literature among a nation that has no parallel in history.

Tournaments first originated among the Arabs, and thence found their
way into France and Italy. Gunpowder was known to them a century before
it appeared in Europe, and they were in possession of the compass in
the eleventh century, and this notwithstanding the fact that a German
chemist is supposed to have discovered gunpowder a century after the
Arabs made use of it, while the compass is more frequently supposed to
be a French or Italian invention of the thirteenth century.

Botany and chemistry were more familiar to them than they were to the
Greeks or Romans. Bagdad and Cordova had famous schools of astronomy
and medicine, and here in the tenth and eleventh centuries the Arabians
were the teachers of the world. Students came to them from France and
other parts of Europe; and their progress, especially in arithmetic,
geometry and astronomy, was marvellous. The poetry of the Arabs is
rhymed like ours, and is always the poetry of passion and love; but it
is in their prose works, the Arabian tales of the Thousand and One
Nights, that they have become most famous. Their richness of fancy in
these prose tales is different from that of the other chivalric
nations. The supernatural world is identical in both; but the moral
world is different. The Arabian tales, like the old chivalric romances,
take us to the realms of fairyland, but the human beings they introduce
are very unlike. Their people are less noble and heroic, more moved by
love and passion, and they depict women by turn as slaves and
divinities. The original author of the Arabian Nights is unknown; but
the book has become a household possession in every civilized country
in the world.

SPANISH.

For six centuries before the advent of the Arabs in Spain the country
was under the Roman yoke, and had adopted the language and arts of the
Romans; but in the eighth century the overthrow of the Romans, the
coming of the Arabs, and contact with Arabian civilization--as well as
the struggle against their Moorish invaders--began to develop in the
Spaniards a spirit that was the foundation of their national
literature. No other people have ever possessed in so s