Page:History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic Vol. I.djvu/423

279 THE SPANISH ARABS. 279 may form a sufficient notion of the taste and mag- chapter . . . VIII. nificence of this era from the remains of the far- famed mosque, now the cathedral of Cordova. This building, which still covers more ground than any other church in Christendom, was esteemed the third in sanctity by the Mahometan world, being inferior only to the Alaksa of Jerusalem and the temple of Mecca. Most of its ancient glories have indeed long since departed. The rich bronze which embossed its gates, the myriads of lamps which illuminated its aisles, have disappeared ; and its interior roof of odoriferous and curiously carved wood has been cut up into guitars and snuff-boxes. But its thousand columns of variegated marble still remain ; and its general dimensions, notwithstand- ing some loose assertions to the contrary, seem to be much the same as they were in the time of the Saracens. European critics, however, condemn its most elaborate beauties as " heavy and barbarous." Its celebrated portals are pronounced " diminutive, and in very bad taste." Its throng of pillars gives it the air of "a park rather than a temple," and the whole is made still more incongruous by the unequal length of their shafts, being grotesquely compensated by a proportionate variation of size in their bases and capitals, rudely fashioned after the Corinthian order. ^^ But if all this gives us a contemptible idea of the Revenues. 15 Conde, Dominacion de los — Xerif Aledris, conocido por EI Arabes, torn. i. pp. 211, 212, 226. Nubiense, Descripcion de Espaiia, — Swinburne, Travels through con Traduccion y Notas de Conde, Spain, (London, 1787,) let. 35. (Madrid, 1799,) pp. 161, 162.—