their main object--the expulsion of the Arabs and Moors from the
Peninsula. It was thus that they ultimately succeeded--a result they
probably would not have attained, had the Moorish leaders been actuated
by similar views, and displayed less forbearance.

Much of the misapprehension which exists in Europe respecting this race
is attributable to the exaggerations of writers; much more to the
absence of reflection in readers, and to the almost universal practice
of bringing every act related of personages inhabiting remote and
half-known climes, to the test of the only customs and manners with
which we are familiar, and which we consider, for no other reason,
superior to all others--making no allowance for difference of education,
climate, tradition, race. An European, subjected to a similar process of
criticism, on the part of an inhabitant of the East, would certainly not
recognise his own portrait--a new disposition of light bearing upon
peculiarities, the existence of which had hitherto been unsuspected by
their owner; and he would manifest a surprise as unfeigned, as a
Frenchman once expressed in my hearing, on finding himself in a
situation almost parallel. Conversing on the subject of a play, acted
in Paris, in which an Englishman cut a ridiculous figure--a lady present
remarked, that, no doubt, in the London theatres the French were not
spared; upon which the Frenchman I allude to--a person possessed of
superior intelligence--exclaimed: "How could that be, since there was
nothing about a Frenchman that could be laughed at?"

On reading of a reprehensible act attributed to a Mahometan, some will
brand Mahometanism in general, and of all times and places, with the
commission of the like crimes, placing the event at a distance of a
thousand leagues, or of a thousand years from its real place and date:
forgetting that power has been abused under all religions; and that we
only hear one side of the question with respect to all that relates to
the Oriental races--our information only reaching us through the medium
of writers of different and hostile faith. It is a singular fact that
the popular terror, which so long attached itself to the idea of a
Saracen, and which derived its origin from the conquests of the
Mahometans, has its equivalent in certain Mahometan countries. In some
parts of the empire of Morocco, the idea of a Christian is that of a
ruffian of immense stature and terrific features; calculated to inspir