favourite
sultana. The edifice had 1200 columns of Greek, Italian, Spanish, and
African marble. Its hall of audience was incrusted with gold and pearls.
Through the long corridors of its seraglio black eunuchs silently
glided. The ladies of the harem, both wives and concubines, were the
most beautiful that could be found. To that establishment alone 6300
persons were attached, The body-guard of the sovereign was composed of
12,000 horsemen, whose cimeters and belts were studded with gold. This
was that Abderrahman who, after a glorious reign of fifty years, sat
down to count the number of days of unalloyed happiness he had
experienced, and could only enumerate fourteen. "Oh man!" exclaimed the
plaintive khalif, "put not thy trust in this present world."

[Sidenote: Social habits of the Moors.] No nation has ever excelled the
Spanish Arabs in the beauty and costliness of their pleasure-gardens. To
them we owe the introduction of very many of our most valuable
cultivated fruits, such as the peach. Retaining the love of their
ancestors for the cooling effect of water in a hot climate, they spared
no pains in the superfluity of fountains, hydraulic works, and
artificial lakes in which fish were raised for the table. Into such a
lake, attached to the palace of Cordova, many loaves were cast each day
to feed the fish. There were also menageries of foreign animals;
aviaries of rare birds; manufactories in which skilled workmen, obtained
from foreign countries, displayed their art in textures of silk, cotton,
linen, and all the miracles of the loom; in jewelry and filigree-work,
with which they ministered to the female pride of the sultanas and
concubines. Under the shade of cypresses cascades disappeared; among
flowering shrubs there were winding walks, bowers of roses, seats cut
out of the rock, and crypt-like grottoes hewn in the living stone.
Nowhere was ornamental gardening better understood; for not only did the
artist try to please the eye as it wandered over the pleasant gradation
of vegetable colour and form--he also boasted his success in the
gratification of the sense of smell by the studied succession of
perfumes from beds of flowers.

[Sidenote: Their domestic life.] To these Saracens we are indebted for
many of our personal comforts. Religiously cleanly, it was not possible
for them to clothe themselves according to the fashion of the natives of
Europe, in a garment unchanged till it dropped to pieces of itself,