religion, an alien blood, and long arrears of vengeance.  When that contest was waged upon the sea or on a foreign soil, it was at least mitigated by the ordinary rules of warfare.  But on Spanish soil it knew no restraint, no limitation but the complete effacement of the Moorish population.  The story of the Morisco Rebellion, which we remember to have first read with absorbed attention in Dunham’s meagre sketch, is here related with a fulness of detail that exhausts the subject, and leaves the mind informed both of causes and results.  Yet the march of the narrative is rapid and unchecked, from the first outbreak of the revolt, when Aben-Farax, with a handful of followers, facing the darkness of night and the blinding snow, penetrated into the streets of Granada, shouting the cry so long unheard in air that had once been so familiar with its sound, “There is no God but Allah, and Mahomet is the prophet of God!”—­through all the strange and terrible vicissitudes of the deadly struggle that ensued, the frightful massacres, the wild guerrilla battles, the fiery onslaughts of the Spanish chivalry, the stealthy surprises of the Moorish mountaineers,—­down to the complete suppression of the insurrection, the removal of the defeated race, the overthrow and death of Aben-Aboo, “the little king of the Alpujarras,” and the ghastly triumph in which his dead body, clothed in the robes of royalty and supported upright on a horse, was led into the capital where his ancestors had once reigned in peaceful splendor, after which the head was cut off and set up in a cage above the wall, “the face turned towards his native hills, which he had loved so well.”

On such a theme, and in such localities, Mr. Prescott is more at home than any other writer, American or European.  His imagination, kindled by long familiar associations, burns with a steady flame.  The characters are portrayed with a free and vigorous pencil, the contrast between the Orientalism of the Spanish Arab and the sterner features of the Spanish Goth being always strongly marked.  The scenery, painted with as much fidelity as truth, is sometimes brought before the eye by minute description, and sometimes, with still happier effect, by incidental touches,—­an epithet or a simile, as appropriate as it is suggestive.  As we follow the route of Mundejar’s army, the “frosty peaks” of the Sierra Nevada are seen “glistening in the sun like palisades of silver”; while terraces, scooped out along the rocky mountain-side, are covered with “bright patches of variegated culture, that hang like a garland round the gaunt Sierra.”  At their removal from Granada, the remnant of what had once been a race of conquerors bid a last farewell to their ancient homes just as “the morning light has broken on the red towers of the Alhambra”; and scattered over the country in small and isolated masses, the presence of the exiles is “sure to be revealed by the minute and elaborate culture of the soil,—­as the secret course of the mountain-stream is betrayed by the brighter green of the meadow.”