Page:History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic Vol. I.djvu/452

308 308 THE SPANISH ARABS. , PART morsels of Massillon, Bossuet, or the rhetorical Thomas, would savour marvellously of bombast ; and how could we in any degree keep pace with the magnificent march of the Castilian ! Yet surely we are not to impugn the taste of all these nations, who attach much more importance, and have paid (at least this is true of the French and Italian) much greater attention to the mere beauties of literary finish, than English writers. Whatever may be the sins of the Arabians on this head, they are certainly not those of negli- gence. The Spanish Arabs, in particular, were noted for the purity and elegance of their idiom ; insomuch that Casiri afiects to determine the local- ity of an author by the superior refinement of his style. Their copious philological and rhetorical treatises, their arts of poetry, grammars, and rhym- ing dictionaries, show to what an excessive re- finement they elaborated the art of composition. Academies, far more numerous than those of Italy, to which they subsequently served for a model, invited by their premiums frequent competitions I'opticai in poetry and eloquence. To poetry, indeed, es- pecially of the tender kind, the Spanish Arabs seem to have been as indiscriminately addicted as the Italians in the time of Petrarch ; and there was scarcely a doctor in church or state, but at some time or other offered up his amorous incense on the altar of the muse.^^ ^6 Petrardi complains in one of and he was afraid the very cattle his letters from the country, that might begin to low in verse;" apud " jiiriscoiisulls and divines, nay his Do Sade, Memoires pour La Vie own valet, had taken to rhyming; de Pttrarque, torn. iii. p. 243