rous
champions. The romantic coloring seemed to belong to the nature of the
subject, and was in harmony with what I had seen in my tour through the
poetical and romantic regions in which the events had taken place. With
all these deductions the work, in all its essential points, was faithful
to historical fact and built upon substantial documents. It was a great
satisfaction to me, therefore, after the doubts that had been expressed
of the authenticity of my chronicle, to find it repeatedly and largely
used by Don Miguel Lafuente Alcantara of Granada in his recent
learned and elaborate history of his native city, he having had ample
opportunity, in his varied and indefatigable researches, of judging how
far it accorded with documentary authority.

I have still more satisfaction in citing the following testimonial of
Mr. Prescott, whose researches for his admirable history of Ferdinand
and Isabella took him over the same ground I had trodden. His
testimonial is written in the liberal and courteous spirit
characteristic of him, but with a degree of eulogium which would make me
shrink from quoting it did I not feel the importance of his voucher for
the substantial accuracy of my work:

"Mr. Irving's late publication, the 'Chronicle of the Conquest
of Granada,' has superseded all further necessity for poetry and,
unfortunately for me, for history. He has fully availed himself of all
the picturesque and animating movement of this romantic era, and the
reader who will take the trouble to compare his chronicle with the
present more prosaic and literal narrative will see how little he
has been seduced from historic accuracy by the poetical aspect of his
subject. The fictitious and romantic dress of his work has enabled him
to make it the medium of reflecting more vividly the floating opinions
and chimerical fancies of the age, while he has illuminated the picture
with the dramatic brilliancy of coloring denied to sober history."*

* Prescott's Ferdinand and Isabella, vol. ii. c. 15.

In the present edition I have endeavored to render the work more worthy
of the generous encomium of Mr. Prescott. Though I still retain the
fiction of the monkish author Agapida, I have brought my narrative more
strictly within historical bounds, have corrected and enriched it in
various parts with facts recently brought to light by the researches
of Alcantara and others, and have sought to render it a faithful and
characteristic pictu