owever, had become so excited by the stirring
events and romantic achievements of this war that I could not return
with composure to the sober biography I had in hand. The idea then
occurred, as a means of allaying the excitement, to throw off a rough
draught of the history of this war, to be revised and completed at
future leisure. It appeared to me that its true course and character
had never been fully illustrated. The world had received a strangely
perverted idea of it through Florian's romance of "Gonsalvo of Cordova,"
or through the legend, equally fabulous, entitled "The Civil Wars of
Granada," by Ginez Perez de la Hita, the pretended work of an Arabian
contemporary, but in reality a Spanish fabrication. It had been woven
over with love-tales and scenes of sentimental gallantry totally
opposite to its real character; for it was, in truth, one of the
sternest of those iron conflicts sanctified by the title of "holy wars."
In fact, the genuine nature of the war placed it far above the need
of any amatory embellishments. It possessed sufficient interest in the
striking contrast presented by the combatants of Oriental and European
creeds, costumes, and manners, and in the hardy and harebrained
enterprises, the romantic adventures, the picturesque forays through
mountain regions, the daring assaults and surprisals of cliff-built
castles and cragged fortresses, which succeeded each other with a
variety and brilliancy beyond the scope of mere invention.

The time of the contest also contributed to heighten the interest.
It was not long after the invention of gunpowder, when firearms and
artillery mingled the flash and smoke and thunder of modern warfare with
the steely splendor of ancient chivalry, and gave an awful magnificence
and terrible sublimity to battle, and when the old Moorish towers and
castles, that for ages had frowned defiance to the battering-rams and
catapults of classic tactics, were toppled down by the lombards of
the Spanish engineers. It was one of the cases in which history rises
superior to fiction.

The more I thought about the subject, the more I was tempted to
undertake it, and the facilities at hand at length determined me. In the
libraries of Madrid and in the private library of the American consul,
Mr. Rich, I had access to various chronicles and other works, both
printed and in manuscript, written at the time by eyewitnesses, and
in some instances by persons who had actually mingled in the